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THE  JOYFUL  HEART. 

SCUM  O'  THE  EARTH  AND  OTHER  POEMS. 

THE  MUSICAL  AMATEUR. 

HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 
BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 


THE  JOYFUL  HEART 


THE  JOYFUL  HEART 


BY 


ROBERT  HAVEN  SCHAUFFLER 

AUTHOR  OF  THE  MUSICAL  AMATEUR,  SCUM  O'  THE  EARTH 
AND  OTHER  POEMS,  ROMANTIC  AMERICA,  ETC. 


"  People  who  are  nobly  happy  constitute 
the  power,  the  beauty  and  the  foundation 
of  the  state." 

JEAN  FINOT:  The  Science  of  Happiness. 


BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 
HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

(3tbe  fiitcrtfibe  prcstf  Cambribjjc 
1914 


COPYRIGHT,    1914,    BY   ROBERT   HAVEN   SCHAUFFLER 
ALL   RIGHTS   RESERVED 

Published  October  191 


Music  Library 


TO 
MY  WIFE 


FOREWORD 

THIS  is  a  guide-book  to  joy.    It  is  for  the 
use  of  the  sad,  the  bored,  the  tired,  anx- 
ious, disheartened  and  disappointed.    It  is  for 
the  use  of  all  those  whose  cup  of  vitality  is  not 
brimming  over. 

The  world  has  not  yet  seen  enough  of  joy. 
It  bears  the  reputation  of  an  elusive  sprite  with 
finger  always  at  lip  bidding  farewell.  In  cer- 
tain dark  periods,  especially  in  times  of  inter- 
national warfare,  it  threatens  to  vanish  alto- 
gether from  the  earth.  It  is  then  the  first  duty 
of  all  peaceful  folk  to  find  and  hold  fast  to 
joy,  keeping  it  in  trust  for  their  embattled 
brothers. 

Even  if  this  were  not  their  duty  as  citizens 
of  the  world,  it  would  be  their  duty  as  patriots. 
For  Jean  Finot  is  right  in  declaring  that  "peo- 
ple who  are  nobly  happy  constitute  the  power, 
the  beauty  and  the  foundation  of  the  state." 
[  vii  ] 


FOREWORD 

This  book  is  a  manual  of  enthusiasm  —  the 
power  which  drives  the  world  —  and  of  those 
kinds  of  exuberance  (physical,  mental  and 
spiritual)  which  can  make  every  moment  of 
every  life  worth  living.  It  aims  to  show  how  to 
get  the  most  joy  not  only  from  traveling  hope- 
fully toward  one's  goal,  but  also  from  the  goal 
itself  on  arrival  there.  It  urges  sound  business 
methods  in  conducting  that  supreme  business, 
the  investment  of  one's  vitality. 

It  would  show  how  one  may  find  happiness 
all  alone  with  his  better  self,  his  *  Auto-Com- 
rade*—  an  accomplishment  well-nigh  lost  in 
this  crowded  age.  It  would  show  how  the  gos- 
pel of  exuberance,  by  offering  the  joys  of 
hitherto  unsuspected  power  to  the  artist  and 
his  audience,  bids  fair  to  lift  the  arts  again  to 
the  lofty  level  of  the  Periclean  age.  It  would 
show  the  so-called  "common"  man  or  woman 
how  to  develop  that  creative  sympathy  which 
may  make  him  a  *  master  by  proxy,'  and  thus 
let  him  know  the  conscious  happiness  of  play- 
ing an  essential  part  in  the  creation  of  works 
[  viii  ] 


FOREWORD 

of  genius.  In  short,  the  book  tries  to  show  how 
the  cup  of  joy  may  not  only  be  kept  full  for 
one's  personal  use,  but  may  also  be  made  hos- 
pitably to  brim  over  for  others. 

To  the  Atlantic  Monthly  thanks  are  due  for 
permission  to  reprint  chapters  I,  III  and  IV; 
to  the  North  American  Review,  for  chapter 
VIII;  and  to  the  Century,  for  chapters  V,  VT, 
IX  and  X. 

R.  H.  S. 

GREENBUSH,  MASS. 
August,  1914. 


CONTENTS 

I.  A  DEFENSE  OF  JOY 3 

II.  THE  BRIMMING  CUP 27 

III.  ENTHUSIASM 43 

IV.  A  CHAPTER  OF  ENTHUSIASMS        .      .  50 
V.  THE  AUTO-COMRADE 73 

VI.  VIM  AND  VISION  .      .      .      .      .      .  102 

VII.  PRINTED  JOT 133 

VIII.  THE  JOYFUL  HEART  FOR  POETS    .      .  153 
IX.  THE  JOYOUS  MISSION  OF  MECHANICAL 

Music 192 

X.  MASTERS  BY  PROXY    ,  .  216 


THE  JOYFUL  HEART 


A   DEFENSE   OF  JOY 

JOY  is  such  stuff  as  the  hinges  of  Heaven's 
doors  are  made  of.  So  our  fathers  be- 
lieved. So  we  supposed  in  childhood.  Since 
then  it  has  become  the  literary  fashion  to  op- 
pose this  idea.  The  writers  would  have  us 
think  of  joy  not  as  a  supernal  hinge,  but  as  a 
pottle  of  hay,  hung  by  a  crafty  creator  before 
humanity's  asinine  nose.  The  donkey  is  thus 
constantly  incited  to  unrewarded  efforts. 
And  when  he  arrives  at  the  journey's  end  he 
is  either  defrauded  of  the  hay  outright,  or  he 
dislikes  it,  or  it  disagrees  with  him. 

Robert    Louis    Stevenson    warns    us    that 

"to  travel  hopefully  is  a  better  thing  than  to 

arrive,"    beautifully   portraying    the   empti- 

ness and  illusory  character  of  achievement. 

[3  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

And,  of  those  who  have  attained,  Mr.  E.  F. 
Benson  exclaims,  "God  help  them!"  These 
sayings  are  typical  of  a  widespread  literary 
fashion.  Now  to  slander  Mistress  Joy  to-day 
is  a  serious  matter.  For  we  are  coming  to 
realize  that  she  is  a  far  more  important  person 
than  we  had  supposed;  that  she  is,  in  fact, 
one  of  the  chief  managers  of  life.  Instead  of 
doing  a  modest  little  business  in  an  obscure 
suburb,  she  has  offices  that  embrace  the  whole 
first  floor  of  humanity's  city  hall. 

Of  course  I  do  not  doubt  that  our  writer- 
friends  note  down  the  truth  as  they  see  it. 
But  they  see  it  imperfectly.  They  merely 
have  a  corner  of  one  eye  on  a  corner  of  the 
truth.  Therefore  they  tell  untruths  that  are 
the  falser  for  being  so  charmingly  and  neatly 
expressed.  What  they  say  about  joy  being 
the  bribe  that  achievement  offers  us  to  get 
itself  realized  may  be  true  in  a  sense.  But 
they  are  wrong  in  speaking  of  the  bribe  as  if 
it  were  an  apple  rotten  at  the  core,  or  a  bag 
of  counterfeit  coin,  or  a  wisp  of  artificial  hay. 
[4  ] 


A    DEFENSE    OF   JOY 

It  is  none  of  these  things.  It  is  sweet  and 
genuine  and  well  worth  the  necessary  effort, 
once  we  are  in  a  position  to  appreciate  it  at 
anything  like  its  true  worth.  We  must  learn 
not  to  trust  the  beautiful  writers  too  im- 
plicitly. For  there  is  no  more  treacherous 
guide  than  the  consummate  artist  on  the 
wrong  track. 

Those  who  decry  the  joy  of  achievement  are 
like  tyros  at  skating  who  venture  alone  upon 
thin  ice,  fall  down,  fall  in,  and  insist  on  the 
way  home  that  winter  sports  have  been 
grossly  overestimated.  This  outcry  about 
men  being  unable  to  enjoy  what  they  have 
attained  is  a  half-truth  which  cannot  skate 
two  consecutive  strokes  in  the  right  direction 
without  the  support  of  its  better  hah*.  And 
its  better  half  is  the  fact  that  one  may  enjoy 
achievement  hugely,  provided  only  he  will 
get  himself  into  proper  condition. 

Of  course  I  am  not  for  one  moment  denying 
that  achievement  is  harder  to  enjoy  than 
the  hope  of  achievement.  Undoubtedly  the 
[  5  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

former  lacks  the  glamour  of  the  indistinct, 
"that  sweet  bloom  of  all  that  is  far  away." 
But  our  celebrated  writer-friends  overlook 
the  fact  that  glamour  and  "sweet  bloom" 
are  so  much  pepsin  to  help  weak  stomachs 
digest  strong  joy.  If  you  would  have  the 
best  possible  time  of  it  in  the  world,  develop 
your  joy-digesting  apparatus  to  the  point 
where  it  can,  without  a  qualm,  dispose  of 
that  tough  morsel,  the  present,  obvious  and 
attained.  There  will  always  be  enough  of 
the  unachieved  at  table  to  furnish  balanced 
rations. 

"God  help  the  attainers!"  —  forsooth! 
Why,  the  ideas  which  I  have  quoted,  if  they 
were  carried  to  logical  lengths,  would  make 
heaven  a  farcical  kill-joy,  a  weary,  stale, 
flat,  unprofitable  morgue  of  disappointed 
hopes,  with  Ennui  for  janitor.  I  admit  that 
the  old  heaven  of  the  Semitic  poets  was  con- 
structed somewhat  along  these  lines.  But 
that  was  no  real  heaven.  The  real  heaven  is 
a  quiet,  harpless,  beautiful  place  where  every 
[  6  ] 


A    DEFENSE    OF   JOY 

one  is  a  heaven-born  creator  and  is  engaged 
—  not  caring  in  the  least  for  food  or  sleep  — 
in  turning  out,  one  after  another,  the  greatest 
of  masterpieces,  and  enjoying  them  to  the 
quick,  both  while  they  are  being  done  and 
when  they  are  quite  achieved. 

I  would  not,  however,  fall  into  the  opposite 
error  and  disparage  the  joy  of  traveling  hope- 
fully. It  is  doubtless  easy  to  amuse  one's 
self  in  a  wayside  air-castle  of  an  hundred 
suites,  equipped  with  self-starting  servants, 
a  Congressional  Library,  a  National  Gallery 
of  pictures,  a  Vatican-ful  of  sculpture,  with 
Hoppe  for  billiard-marker,  Paderewski  to 
keep  things  going  in  the  music-room,  Wright 
as  grand  hereditary  master  of  the  hangar, 
and  Miss  Annette  Kellerman  in  charge  of  the 
swimming-pool.  I  am  not  denying  that  such 
a  castle  is  easier  to  enjoy  before  the  air  has 
been  squeezed  out  of  it  by  the  horny  clutch 
of  reality,  which  moves  it  to  the  journey's 
end  and  sets  it  down  with  a  jar  in  its  fifty- 
foot  lot,  complete  with  seven  rooms  and  bath, 
[7] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

and  only  half  an  hour  from  the  depot.  But 
this  is  not  for  one  moment  admitting  the  con- 
tention of  the  lords  of  literature  that  the  air- 
castle  has  a  monopoly  of  joy,  while  the  seven 
rooms  and  bath  have  a  monopoly  of  disillu- 
sionized boredom  and  anguish  of  mind.  If 
your  before-mentioned  apparatus  is  only  in 
working  order,  you  can  have  no  end  of  joy 
out  of  the  cottage.  And  any  morning  before 
breakfast  you  can  build  another,  and  vastly 
superior,  air-castle  on  the  vacant  land  behind 
the  woodshed. 

"What  is  all  this,"  I  heard  the  reader  ask, 
"about  a  joy-digesting  apparatus?" 
^  It  consists  of  four  parts.  Physical  exuber- 
ance is  the  first.  To  a  considerable  extent 
joy  depends  on  an  overplus  of  health.  The 
joy  of  artistic  creation,  for  instance,  lies  not 
so  intensely  and  intoxicatingly  hi  what  you 
may  some  time  accomplish  as  in  what  has 
actually  just  started  into  life  under  your  pen- 
cil or  clayey  thumb,  your  bow  or  brush.  For 
what  you  are  about  to  receive,  the  Lord,  as 
18] 


A    DEFENSE    OF   JOY 

a  rule,  makes  you  duly  thankful.  But  with 
the  thankfulness  is  always  mingled  the  shad- 
owy apprehension  that  your  powers  may  fail 
you  when  next  you  wish  to  use  them.  Thus 
the  joy  of  anticipatory  creation  is  akin  to  pain. 
It  holds  no  such  pure  bliss  as  actual  creation. 
When  you  are  in  full  swing,  what  you  have 
just  finished  (unless  you  are  exhausted)  seems 
to  you  nearly  always  the  best  piece  of  work 
that  you  have  ever  done.  For  your  critical, 
inhibitory  apparatus  is  temporarily  paralyzed 
by  the  intoxication  of  the  moment.  What 
makes  so  many  artists  fail  at  these  times  to 
enjoy  a  maximum  of  pleasure  and  a  minimum 
of  its  opposite,  is  that  they  do  not  train  their 
bodies  "like  a  strong  man  to  run  a  race,"  and 
make  and  keep  them  aboundingly  vital.  The 
actual  toil  takes  so  much  of  their  meager 
vitality  that  they  have  too  little  left  with 
which  to  enjoy  the  resulting  achievement. 
If  they  become  ever  so  slightly  intoxicated 
over  the  work,  they  have  a  dreadful  morning 
after,  whose  pain  they  read  back  into  the  joy 

r  9 1 


THE    JOYFUL   HEART 

preceding.  And  then  they  groan  out  that  all 
is  vanity,  and  slander  joy  by  calling  it  a  pottle 
of  hay. 

It  takes  so  much  vitality  to  enjoy  achieve- 
ment because  achievement  is  something  fin- 
ished. And  you  cannot  enjoy  what  is  finished 
in  art,  for  instance,  without  re-creating  it  for 
yourself.  But,  though  re-creation  demands 
almost  as  much  vital  overplus  as  creation,  the 
layman  should  realize  that  he  has,  as  a  rule, 
far  more  of  this  overplus  than  the  pallid, 
nervous  sort  of  artist.  And  he  should  accord- 
ingly discount  the  other's  lamentations  over 
the  vanity  of  human  achievement. 

The  reason  why  Hazlitt  took  no  pleasure 
in  writing,  and  hi  having  written,  his  delicious 
essays  is  that  he  did  not  know  how  to  take 
proper  care  of  his  body.  To  be  extremely 
antithetical,  I,  on  the  other  hand,  take  so 
much  pleasure  in  writing  and  in  having  writ- 
ten these  essays  of  mine  (which  are  no  hun- 
dredth part  as  beautiful,  witty,  wise,  or  bril- 
liant as  Hazlitt's),  that  the  leaden  showers  of 
[  10] 


A    DEFENSE    OP   JOY 

drudgery,  discouragement,  and  disillusion- 
ment which  accompany  and  follow  almost 
every  one  of  them,  and  the  need  of  Spartan 
training  for  their  sake,  hardly  displace  a  drop 
from  the  bucket  of  joy  that  the  work  brings. 
Training  has  meant  so  much  vital  overplus 
to  me  that  I  long  ago  spurted  and  caught  up 
with  my  pottle  of  joy.  And,  finding  that  it 
made  a  cud  of  unimagined  flavor  and  dura- 
bility, I  substituted  for  the  pottle  a  placard 
to  this  effect: 

REMEMBER  THE  RACE! 

This  placard,  hung  always  before  me,  is  a 
reminder  that  a  decent  respect  for  the  laws 
of  good  sportsmanship  requires  one  to  keep 
in  as  hard  condition  as  possible  for  the  hun- 
dred-yard dash  called  Life.  Such  a  regimen 
pays  thousands  of  per  cent,  in  yearly  divi- 
dends. It  allows  one  to  live  in  an  almost 
continual  state  of  exaltation  rather  like  that 
which  the  sprinter  enjoys  when,  after  months 
of  flawless  preparation,  he  hurls  himself 
[  11  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

through  space  like  some  winged  creature  too 
much  in  love  with  the  earth  to  leave  it;  while 
every  drop  of  his  tingling  blood  makes  him 
conscious  of  endless  reserves  of  vitality. 

Tingling  blood  is  a  reagent  which  is  apt  to 
transmute  all  things  into  joy  —  even  sorrow 
itself.  I  wonder  if  any  one  seriously  doubts 
that  it  was  just  this  which  was  giving  Brown- 
ing's young  David  such  a  glorious  time  of  it 
when  he  broke  into  that  jubilant  war-whoop 
about  "our  manhood's  prime  vigor"  and  "the 
wild  joys  of  living." 

The  physical  variety  of  exuberance,  once 
won,  makes  easy  the  winning  of  the  mental 
variety.  This,  when  it  is  almost  isolated  from 
the  other  kinds,  is  what  you  enjoy  when  you 
soar  easily  along  over  the  world  of  abstract 
thought,  or  drink  delight  of  battle  with  your 
intellectual  peers,  or  follow  with  full  under- 
standing the  phonographic  version  of  some 
mighty,  four-part  fugue.  To  attain  this 
means  work.  But  if  your  body  is  shouting 
for  joy  over  the  mere  act  of  living,  mental 
[  121 


A    DEFENSE    OF   JOY 

calisthenics  no  longer  appear  so  impossibly 
irksome.  And  anyway,  the  discipline  of  your 
physical  training  has  induced  your  will  to  put 
up  with  a  good  deal  of  irksomeness.  This  is 
partly  because  its  eye  is  fixed  on  something 
beyond  the  far-off,  divine  event  of  achieving 
concentration  on  one  subject  for  five  minutes 
without  allowing  the  mind  to  wander  from  it 
more  than  twenty-five  times.  That  something 
is  a  keenness  of  perception  which  makes  any 
given  fragment  of  nature  or  human  nature 
or  art,  however  seemingly  barren  and  common- 
place, endlessly  alive  with  possibilities  of 
joyful  discovery  —  with  possibilities,  even,  of 
a  developing  imagination.  For  the  Auto- 
Comrade,  your  better  self,  is  a  magician.  He 
can  get  something  out  of  nothing. 

At  this  stage  of  your  development  you  will 
probably  discover  in  yourself  enough  mental 
adroitness  and  power  of  concentration  to 
enable  you  to  weed  discordant  thoughts  out 
of  the  mind.  As  you  wander  through  your 
mental  pleasure-grounds,  whenever  you  come 
[  13  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

upon  an  ugly  intruder  of  a  thought  which 
might  bloom  into  some  poisonous  emotion 
such  as  fear,  envy,  hate,  remorse,  anger,  and 
the  like,  there  is  only  one  right  way  to  treat 
it.  Pull  it  up  like  a  weed;  drop  it  on  the  rub- 
bish heap  as  if  it  were  a  stinging  nettle;  and 
let  some  harmonious  thought  grow  in  its 
place.  There  is  no  more  reckless  consumer  of 
all  kinds  of  exuberance  than  the  discordant 
thought,  and  weeding  it  out  saves  such  an 
amazing  quantity  of  eau  de  vie  wherewith  to 
water  the  garden  of  joy,  that  every  man  may 
thus  be  his  own  Burbank  and  accomplish 
marvels  of  mental  horticulture. 

When  you  have  won  physical  and  mental 
exuberance,  you  will  have  pleased  your  Auto- 
Comrade  to  such  an  extent  that  he  will  most 
likely  startle  and  delight  you  with  a  birth- 
day present  as  the  reward  of  virtue.  Some 
fine  morning  you  will  climb  out  of  the  right 
side  of  your  bed  and  come  whistling  down  to 
breakfast  and  find  by  your  plate  a  neat 
packet  of  spiritual  exuberance  with  his  best 
[  14  1 


A    DEFENSE    OF   JOY 

wishes.  Such  a  gift  is  what  the  true  artist 
enjoys  when  inspiration  comes  too  fast  and 
full  for  a  dozen  pens  or  brushes  to  record. 
Jeanne  d'Arc  knew  it  when  the  mysterious 
voices  spoke  to  her;  and  St.  John  on  Patmos; 
and  every  true  lover  at  certain  moments;  and 
each  one  of  us  who  has  ever  flung  wide  the 
gates  of  prayer  and  felt  the  infinite  come 
flooding  in  as  the  clean  vigor  of  the  tide 
swirls  up  through  a  sour,  stagnant  marsh; 
or  who  at  some  supreme  instant  has  felt  en- 
folding him,  like  the  everlasting  arms,  a  sure 
conviction  of  immortality. 

Now  for  purposes  of  convenience  we  may 
speak  of  these  three  kinds  of  exuberance  as 
we  would  speak  of  different  individuals.  But 
in  reality  they  hardly  ever  exist  alone.  The 
physical  variety  is  almost  sure  to  induce  the 
mental  and  spiritual  varieties  and  to  project 
itself  into  them.  The  mental  kind  looks  before 
and  after  and  warms  body  and  soul  with  its 
radiant  smile.  And  even  when  we  are  in  the 
throes  of  a  purely  spiritual  love  or  religious 
[  15  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

ecstasy,  we  have  a  feeling  —  though  perhaps 
it  is  illusory  —  that  the  flesh  and  the  intellect 
are  more  potent  than  we  knew. 

These,  then,  constitute  the  first  three  parts 
of  the  joy-digesting  apparatus.  I  think  there 
is  no  need  of  dwelling  on  their  efficacy  in 
helping  one  to  enjoy  achievement.  Let  us 
pass,  therefore,  to  the  fourth  and  last  part, 
which  is  self-restraint. 

Perhaps  the  worst  charge  usually  made 
against  achievement  is  its  sameness,  its  dry 
monotony.  On  the  way  to  it  (the  writers  say) 
you  are  constantly  falling  in  with  something 
new.  But,  once  there,  you  must  abandon  the 
variegated  delights  of  yesterday  and  settle 
down,  to-day  and  forever,  to  the  same  old 
thing.  In  this  connection  I  recall  an  epigram 
of  Professor  Woodrow  Wilson's.  He  was 
lecturing  to  us  young  Princetonians  about 
Gladstone's  ability  to  make  any  subject  of 
absorbing  interest,  even  a  four  hours'  speech 
on  the  budget.  "Young  gentlemen,"  cried 
the  professor,  "it  is  not  the  subject  that  is 
[  16  ] 


A    DEFENSE    OF   JOY 

dry.  It  is  you  that  are  dry!"  Similarly,  it 
is  not  achievement  that  is  dry;  it  is  the 
achievers,  who  fondly  suppose  that  now,  hav- 
ing achieved,  they  have  no  further  use  for  the 
exuberance  of  body,  mind,  and  spirit,  or  the 
self-restraint  which  helped  them  toward  their 
goal. 

Particularly  the  self-restraint.  One  chief 
reason  why  the  thing  attained  palls  so  often 
and  so  quickly  is  that  men  seek  to  enjoy  it 
immoderately.  Why,  if  Ponce  de  Leon  had 
found  the  fountain  of  youth  and  drunk  of  it 
as  bibulously  as  we  are  apt  to  guzzle  the  cup 
of  achievement,  he  would  not  only  have  ar- 
rested the  forward  march  of  time,  but  would 
have  over-reached  himself  and  slipped  back- 
ward through  the  years  of  his  age  to  become  a 
chronic  infant  in  arms.  Even  traveling  hope- 
fully would  pall  if  one  kept  at  it  twenty-four 
hours  a  day.  Just  feast  on  the  rich  food  of 
Beethoven's  Fifth  Symphony  morning,  noon, 
and  night  for  a  few  months,  and  see  how  you 
feel.  There  is  no  other  way.  Achievement 
[  171 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

must  be  moderately  indulged  in,  not  made  the 
pretext  for  a  debauch.  If  one  has  achieved 
a  new  cottage,  for  example,  let  him  take  nu- 
merous week-end  vacations  from  it.  And  let 
not  an  author  sit  down  and  read  through  his 
own  book  the  moment  it  comes  from  the 
binder.  A  few  more  months  will  suffice  to 
blur  the  memory  of  those  irrevocable,  nau- 
seating foundry  proofs.  If  he  forbears  — 
instead  of  being  sickened  by  the  stuff,  no 
gentle  reader,  I  venture  to  predict,  will  be 
more  keenly  and  delicately  intrigued  by  the 
volume's  vigors  and  subtleties. 

If  you  have  recently  made  a  fortune,  be 
sure,  in  the  course  of  your  Continental  wan- 
derings, to  take  many  a  third-class  carriage 
full  of  witty  peasants,  and  stop  at  many  an 
"unpretending"  inn  "Of  the  White  Hind," 
with  bowered  rose-garden  and  bowling-green 
running  down  to  the  trout-filled  river,  and 
mine  ample  hostess  herself  to  make  and  bring 
you  the  dish  for  which  she  is  famous  over  half 
the  countryside.  Thus  you  will  increase  by 
I  18] 


A    DEFENSE    OF   JOY 

at  least  one  Baedekerian  star-power  the 
luster  of  the  next  Grand  Hotel  Royal  de 
rilnivers  which  may  receive  you.  And  be 
sure  to  alternate  pedestrianism  with  mo- 
toring, and  the  "peanut"  gallery  with  the 
stage-box.  Omit  not  to  punctuate  with  stag 
vacations  long  periods  of  domestic  felicity. 
When  Solomon  declared  that  all  was  vanity 
and  vexation  of  spirit  I  suspect  that  he  had 
been  more  than  unusually  intemperate  in 
frequenting  the  hymeneal  altar. 

Why  is  it  that  the  young  painters,  musi- 
cians, and  playwrights  who  win  fame  and 
fortune  as  heroes  in  the  novels  of  Mr.  E.  F. 
Benson  enjoy  achievement  so  hugely?  Simply 
because  they  are  exuberant  in  mind,  body, 
and  spirit,  and,  if  not  averse  to  brandy  and 
soda,  are  in  other  ways,  at  least,  paragons  of 
moderation.  And  yet,  in  his  "Book  of 
Months,"  Mr.  Benson  requests  God  to  help 
those  who  have  attained! 

With  this  fourfold  equipment  of  the  three 
exuberances  and  moderation,  I  defy  Solomon 
[  19] 


THE   JOYFUL   HEART 

himself  in  all  his  glory  not  to  enjoy  the  situa- 
tion immensely  and  settle  down  in  high  good 
humor  and  content  with  the  paltry  few  scores 
of  wives  already  achieved.  I  defy  him  not 
to  enjoy  even  his  fame. 

We  have  heard  much  from  the  gloomily 
illustrious  about  the  fraudulent  promise  of 
fame.  At  a  distance,  they  admit,  it  seems 
like  a  banquet  board  spread  with  a  most 
toothsome  feast.  But  step  up  to  the  table. 
All  you  find  there  is  dust  and  ashes,  vanity 
and  vexation  of  spirit  and  a  desiccated 
joint  that  defies  the  stoutest  carver.  If  a 
man  holds  this  view,  however,  you  may  be 
rather  sure  that  he  belongs  to  the  bourgeois 
great.  For  it  is  just  as  bourgeois  to  win  fame 
and  then  not  know  what  on  earth  to  do  with 
it,  as  it  is  to  win  fortune  and  then  not  know 
what  on  earth  to  do  with  it.  The  more  cul- 
tivated a  famous  man  is,  the  more  he  must 
enjoy  the  situation;  for  along  with  his  dry 
scrag  of  fame,  the  more  he  must  have  of  the 
sauce  which  alone  makes  it  palatable.  The 
[20] 


A    DEFENSE    OF   JOY 

recipe  for  this  sauce  runs  as  follows:  to  one 
amphoraful  best  physical  exuberance  add 
spice  of  keen  perception,  cream  of  imagina- 
tion, and  fruits  of  the  spirit.  Serve  with 
grain  of  salt. 

That  famous  person  is  sauceless  who  can, 
without  a  tingle  of  joy,  overhear  the  couple  in 
the  next  steamer-chairs  mentioning  his  name 
casually  to  each  other  as  an  accepted  and 
honored  household  word.  He  has  no  sauce 
for  his  scrag  if  he,  unmoved,  can  see  the  face 
of  some  beautiful  child  in  the  holiday  crowd 
suddenly  illuminated  by  the  pleasure  of  recog- 
nizing him,  from  his  pictures,  as  the  author 
of  her  favorite  story.  He  is  bourgeois  if  it 
gives  him  no  joy  when  the  weight  of  his 
name  swings  the  beam  toward  the  good 
cause;  or  when  the  mail  brings  luminous  grati- 
tude and  comprehension  from  the  perfect 
stranger  in  Topeka  or  Tokyo.  No;  fame  to 
the  truly  cultivated  should  be  fully  as 
enjoyable  as  traveling  hopefully  toward 
fame. 

[21  J 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

In  certain  other  cases,  indeed,  attainment 
is  even  more  delicious  than  the  hope  thereof. 
Think  of  the  long,  cool  drink  at  the  New 
Mexican  pueblo  after  a  day  in  the  incandes- 
cent desert,  with  your  tongue  gradually  en- 
larging itself  from  thirst.  How  is  it  with  you, 
O  golfer,  when,  even  up  at  the  eighteenth, 
you  top  into  the  hazard,  make  a  desperate 
demonstration  with  the  niblick,  and  wipe  the 
sand  out  of  your  eyes  barely  hi  time  to  see 
your  ball  creep  across  the  distant  green  and 
drop  into  the  hole?  Has  not  the  new  presi- 
dent's aged  father  a  slightly  better  time  at 
the  inauguration  of  his  dear  boy  than  he  had 
at  any  time  during  the  fifty  years  of  hoping 
for  and  predicting  that  consummation?  Does 
not  the  successful  altruist  enjoy  more  keenly 
the  certainty  of  having  made  the  world  a 
better  place  to  live  in,  than  he  had  enjoyed 
the  hope  of  achieving  that  desirable  end? 
Can  there  be  any  comparison  between  the 
joys  of  the  tempest-driven  soul  aspiring, 
now  hopefully,  now  despairingly,  to  port, 
[  22  ] 


A    DEFENSE    OF   JOY 

and  the  joys  of  the  same  soul  which  has 
at  last  found  a  perfect  haven  in  the  heart 
of  God? 

And  still  the  writers  go  on  talking  of  joy 
as  if  it  were  a  pottle  of  hay  —  a  flimsy  fraud 
—  and  of  the  satisfaction  of  attainment  as  if 
it  were  unattainable.  Why  do  they  not 
realize,  at  least,  that  their  every  thrill  of 
response  to  a  beautiful  melody,  their  every 
laugh  of  delighted  comprehension  of  Hazlitt 
or  Crothers,  is  in  itself  attainment?  The 
creative  appreciator  of  art  is  always  at  his 
goal.  And  the  much-maligned  present  is  the 
only  time  at  our  disposal  in  which  to  enjoy 
the  much-advertised  future. 

Too  bad  that  our  literary  friends  should 
have  gone  to  extremes  on  this  point!  If 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson  had  noted  that  "to 
travel  hopefully  is  an  easier  thing  than  to 
arrive,"  he  would  undoubtedly  have  hit  the 
truth.  If  Mr.  Benson  had  said,  "If  you  at- 
tain, God  help  you  bountifully  to  exuberance," 
etc.,  that  would  have  been  unexceptionable. 
[  23  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

It  would  even  have  been  a  more  useful  — 
though  slightly  supererogatory  —  service,  to 
point  out  for  the  million-and-first  time  that 
achievement  is  not  all  that  it  seems  to  be 
from  a  considerable  distance.  In  other  words, 
that  the  laws  of  perspective  will  not  budge. 
These  writers  would  thus  quite  sufficiently 
have  played  dentist  to  Disappointment  and 
extracted  his  venomous  fangs  for  us  in  ad- 
vance. What  the  gentlemen  really  should 
have  done  was  to  perform  the  dentistry  first, 
reminding  us  once  again  that  a  part  of  attain- 
ment is  illusory  and  consists  of  such  stuff 
as  dreams  —  good  and  bad  —  are  made  of. 
Then,  on  the  other  hand,  they  should  have 
demonstrated  attainment's  good  points,  finally 
leading  up  to  its  supreme  advantage.  '  This 
advantage  is  —  its  strategic  position. 

Arriving  beats  hoping  to  arrive,  in  this: 
that  while  the  hoper  is  so  keenly  hopeful  that 
he  has  little  attention  to  spare  for  anything 
besides  the  future,  the  arriver  may  take  a 
broader,  more  leisurely  survey  of  things. 
[24  ] 


A    DEFENSE    OF   JOY 

The  hoper's  eyes  are  glued  to  the  distant  peak. 
The  attainer  of  that  peak  may  recover  his 
breath  and  enjoy  a  complete  panorama  of  his 
present  achievement  and  may  amuse  him- 
self moreover  by  re-climbing  the  mountain  in 
retrospect.  He  has  also  yonder  farther  and 
loftier  peak  in  his  eye,  which  he  may  now  look 
forward  to  attacking  the  week  after  next; 
for  this  little  preliminary  jaunt  is  giving  him 
his  mountain  legs.  Hence,  while  the  hoper 
enjoys  only  the  future,  the  achiever,  if  his 
joy-digesting  apparatus  be  working  properly, 
rejoices  with  exceeding  great  joy  in  past, 
present,  and  future  alike.  He  has  an  ad- 
vantage of  three  to  one  over  the  merely  hope- 
ful traveler.  And  when  they  meet  this  is  the 
song  he  sings:  — 

Mistress  Joy  is  at  your  side 
Waiting  to  become  a  bride. 

Soft!  Restrain  your  jubilation. 
That  ripe  mouth  may  not  be  kissed 
Ere  you  stand  examination. 
Mistress  Joy  's  a  eugenist. 

[  25  1 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

Is  your  crony  Moderation? 
Do  your  senses  say  you  sooth? 
Are  your  veins  the  kind  that  tingle? 
Is  your  soul  awake  in  truth? 

If  these  traits  in  you  commingle 
Joy  no  more  shall  leave  you  single. 


II 

THE   BRIMMING   CUP 

EXUBERANCE  is  the  income  yielded  by 
a  wise  investment  of  one's  vitality.  On 
this  income,  so  long  as  it  flows  in  regularly, 
the  moderate  man  may  live  in  the  Land  of  the 
Joyful  Heart,  incased  hi  triple  steel  against 
any  arrows  of  outrageous  fortune  that  happen 
to  stray  hi  across  the  frontier.  Immigrants 
to  this  land  who  have  no  such  income  are 
denied  admission.  They  may  steam  into  the 
country's  principal  port,  past  the  great  statue 
of  the  goddess  Joy  who  holds  aloft  a  brimming 
cup  in  the  act  of  pledging  the  world.  But 
they  are  put  ashore  upon  a  small  island  for 
inspection.  And  so  soon  as  the  inferior  char- 
acter of  their  investments  becomes  known, 
or  their  recklessness  in  eating  into  their  prin- 
cipal, they  are  deported. 

The  contrast  between  those  within  the  well- 
[  27  1 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

guarded  gates  and  those  without  is  an  affect- 
ing one.  The  latter  often  squander  vast  for- 
tunes in  futile  attempts  to  gain  a  foothold  in 
the  country.  And  they  have  a  miserable  tune 
of  it.  Many  of  the  natives,  on  the  other 
hand,  are  so  poor  that  they  have  constantly 
to  fight  down  the  temptation  to  touch  their 
principal.  But  every  time  they  resist,  the 
old  miracle  happens  for  them  once  more: 
the  sheer  act  of  living  turns  out  to  be  "para- 
dise enow.'* 

Now  no  mere  fullness  of  life  will  qualify 
a  man  for  admission  to  the  Land  of  the  Joy- 
ful Heart.  One  must  have  overflowingness  of 
life.  In  his  book  "The  Science  of  Happiness  " 
Jean  Finot  declares,  that  the  "disenchantment 
and  the  sadness  which  degenerate  into  a  sort 
of  pessimistic  melancholy  are  frequently  due 
to  the  diminution  of  the  vital  energy.  And 
as  pain  and  sorrow  mark  the  diminution,  the 
joy  of  living  and  the  upspringing  of  happiness 
signify  the  increase  of  energy.  ...  By  using 
special  instruments,  such  as  the  plethysmo- 
[  28  ] 


THE    BRIMMING    CUP 

graph  of  Hallion,  the  pneumograph  of  Marey, 
the  sphygmometer  of  Cheron,  and  so  many 
others  which  have  come  hi  fashion  during 
these  latter  years,  we  have  succeeded  in  prov- 
ing experimentally  that  joy,  sadness,  and  pain 
depend  upon  our  energy."  To  keep  exu- 
berant one  must  possess  more  than  just  enough 
vitality  to  fill  the  cup  of  the  present.  There 
must  be  enough  to  make  it  brim  over.  Real 
exuberance,  however,  is  not  the  extravagant, 
jarring  sort  of  thing  that  some  thoughtless 
persons  suppose  it  to  be.  The  word  is  not 
accented  on  the  first  syllable.  Indeed,  it 
might  just  as  well  be  "iwuberance."  It  does 
not  long  to  make  an  impression  or,  in  vulgar 
phrase,  to  "get  a  rise";  but  tends  to  be  self- 
contained.  It  is  not  boisterousness.  It  is 
generous  and  infectious,  while  boisterousness 
is  inclined  to  be  selfish  and  repellent.  Most  of 
us  would  rather  spend  a  week  among  a  crowd 
of  mummies  than  in  a  gang  of  boisterous 
young  blades.  For  boisterousness  is  only  a 
degenerate  exuberance,  drunk  and  on  the 
I  29  1 


THE   JOYFUL   HEART 

rampage.  The  royal  old  musician  and  poet 
was  not  filled  with  this,  but  with  the  real 
thing,  when  he  sang: 

"He  leadeth  me  beside  the  still  waters. 
He  restoreth  my  soul .  .  . 
My  cup  runneth  over." 

The  merely  boisterous  man,  on  the  other 
hand,  is  a  fatuous  spendthrift  of  his  fortune. 
He  reminds  us  how  close  we  are  of  kin  to  the 
frolicsome  chimpanzee.  His  attitude  was  ex- 
pressed on  election  night  by  a  young  man  of 
Manhattan  who  shouted  hoarsely  to  his 
fellow: 

"On  with  the  dance;  let  joy  be  unrefined!" 

Neither  should  mere  vivacity  be  mistaken 
for  exuberance.  It  is  no  more  surely  indicative 
of  the  latter  than  is  the  laugh  of  a  parrot. 
One  of  the  chief  advantages  of  the  Teutonic 
over  the  Latin  type  of  man  is  that  the  Latin 
is  tempted  to  waste  his  precious  vital  overplus 
through  a  continuous  display  of  vivacity,  while 
the  less  demonstrative  Teuton  more  easily 
[  30  ] 


THE    BRIMMING    CUP 

stores  his  up  for  use  where  it  will  count.  This 
gives  him  an  advantage  in  such  pursuits  as 
athletics  and  empire-building. 

The  more  exuberance  of  all  varieties  one 
has  stored  up  in  body  and  mind  and  spirit, 
the  more  of  it  one  can  bring  to  bear  at  the 
right  moment  upon  the  things  that  count  for 
most  in  the  world  —  the  things  that  owe  to  it 
their  lasting  worth  and  their  very  existence. 
A  little  of  this  precious  commodity,  more  or 
less,  is  what  often  makes  the  difference  be- 
tween the  ordinary  and  the  supreme  achieve- 
ment. It  is  the  liquid  explosive  that  shatters 
the  final,  and  most  stubborn,  barrier  between 
man  and  the  Infinite.  It  is  what  Walt  Whit- 
man called  "that  last  spark,  that  sharp  flash 
of  power,  that  something  or  other  more  which 
gives  life  to  all  great  literature." 

The  happy  man  is  the  one  who  possesses 
these  three  kinds  of  overplus,  and  whose  will 
is  powerful  enough  to  keep  them  all  healthy 
and  to  keep  him  from  indulging  in  their 
delights  intemperately. 

[  31  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

It  is  a  ridiculous  fallacy  to  assume,  as  many 
do,  that  such  fullness  of  life  is  an  attribute  of 
youth  alone  and  slips  out  of  the  back  door 
when  middle  age  knocks  at  the  front.  It  is 
no  more  bound  to  go  as  the  wrinkles  and  gray 
hairs  arrive  than  your  income  is  bound  to 
take  wings  two  or  three  score  years  after  the 
original  investment  of  the  principal.  To 
ascribe  it  to  youth  as  an  exclusive  attribute 
is  as  fatuous  as  it  would  be  to  ascribe 
a  respectable  income  only  to  the  recent 
investor. 

A  red-letter  day  it  will  be  for  us  when  we 
realize  that  exuberance  represents  for  every 
one  the  income  from  his  fund  of  vitality; 
that  when  one's  exuberance  is  all  gone,  his 
income  is  temporarily  exhausted;  and  that 
he  cannot  go  on  living  at  the  same  rate  with- 
out touching  the  principal.  The  hard-headed, 
harder-worked  American  business  man  is  ad- 
mittedly clever  and  prudent  about  money 
matters.  But  when  he  comes  to  deal  with 
immensely  more  important  matters  such  as 
[  32  ] 


THE    BRIMMING    CUP 

life,  health,  and  joy,  he  often  needs  a  guardian. 
He  has  not  yet  grasped  the  obvious  truth  that 
a  man's  fund  of  vitality  ought  to  be  adminis- 
tered upon  at  least  as  sound  a  business  basis 
as  his  fund  of  dollars.  The  principal  should 
not  be  broken  into  for  living  expenses  during 
a  term  of  at  least  ninety-nine  years.  (Metch- 
nikoff  says  that  this  term  is  one  hundred  and 
twenty  or  so  if  you  drink  enough  of  the  Bul- 
garian bacillus.)  And  one  should  not  be 
content  with  anything  short  of  a  substantial 
rate  of  interest. 

In  one  respect  this  life-business  is  a  simpler 
thing  to  manage  than  the  dollar-business. 
For,  in  the  former,  if  the  interest  comes  hi 
regularly  and  unimpaired,  you  may  know  that 
the  principal  is  safe,  while  in  the  dollar-busi- 
ness they  may  be  paying  your  interest  out 
of  your  principal,  and  you  none  the  wiser 
until  the  crash.  But  here  the  difference 
ceases.  For  if  little  or  no  vital  interest  comes 
in,  your  generous  scale  of  living  is  pinched. 
You  may  defer  the  catastrophe  a  little  by 
[  33  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

borrowing  short-time  loans  at  a  ruinous  rate 
from  usurious  stimulants,  giving  many  pounds 
of  flesh  as  security.  But  soon  Shylock  fore- 
closes and  you  are  forced  to  move  with  your 
sufferings  to  the  slums  and  ten-cent  lodging- 
houses  of  Life.  Moreover,  you  must  face  a 
brutal  dispossession  from  even  the  poor  flat 
or  dormitory  cot  you  there  occupy  —  out 
amid  the  snows  and  blasts  — 

"Where  he  stands,  the  Arch  Fear  in  a  visible  form" 

there  to  pay  slack  life's  "arrears  of  pain, 
darkness,  and  cold." 

The  reason  why  every  day  is  a  joy  to  the 
normal  child  is  that  he  fell  heir  at  birth  to  a 
fortune  of  vitality  and  has  not  yet  had  time 
to  squander  all  his  substance  hi  riotous  or 
thoughtless  living,  or  to  overdraw  his  account 
in  the  Bank  of  Heaven  on  Earth.  Every  one 
of  his  days  is  a  joy  —  that  is,  except  in  so  far 
as  his  elders  have  impressed  their  tired  stand- 
ards of  behavior  too  masterfully  upon  him. 
"Happy  as  a  child"  —  the  commonness  of  the 
[  34  ] 


THE    BRIMMING    CUP 

phrase  is  in  itself  a  commentary.  In  order  to 
remain  as  happy  as  this  for  a  century  or  so, 
all  that  a  child  has  to  do  is  to  invest  his  vital- 
ity on  sound  business  principles,  and  never 
overdraw  or  borrow.  I  shall  not  here  go  into 
the  myriad  details  of  just  how  to  invest  and 
administer  one's  vitality.  For  there  is  no 
dearth  of  wise  books  and  physicians  and  "Mas- 
ters of  the  Inn,"  competent  to  mark  out  sound 
business  programs  of  work,  exercise,  rec- 
reation, and  regimen  for  body,  mind,  and 
spirit;  while  all  that  you  must  contribute  to 
the  enterprise  is  the  requisite  comprehension, 
time,  money,  and  will-power.  You  see,  I  am 
not  a  professor  of  vital  commerce  and  in- 
vestment; I  air  a  stump-speaker,  trying  to 
induce  the  voters  to  elect  a  sound  business 
administration. 

I  believe  that  the  blessings  of  climate  give 
us  of  North  America  less  excuse  than  most 
other  people  for  failing  to  put  such  an  adminis- 
tration into  office.  It  is  noteworthy  that  many 
of  the  Europeans  who  have  recently  written 
I  35  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

their  impressions  of  the  United  States  imagine 
that  Colonel  Roosevelt's  brimming  cup  of 
vitality  is  shared  by  nearly  the  whole  nation. 
If  it  only  were!  But  the  fact  that  these  ob- 
servers think  so  would  seem  to  confirm  our 
belief  that  our  own  cup  brims  over  more 
plentifully  than  that  of  Europe.  This  is 
probably  due  to  the  exhilarating  climate 
which  makes  America  —  physically,  at  least, 
though  not  yet  economically  and  socially  — 
the  promised  land. 

Of  course  I  realize  the  absurdity  of  urging 
the  great  majority  of  human  beings  to  keep 
within  their  vital  incomes.  To  ask  the 
overworked,  under-fed,  under-rested,  under- 
played, shoddily  dressed,  over-crowded  masses 
of  humanity  why  they  are  not  exuberant,  is 
to  ask  again,  with  Marie  Antoinette,  why  the 
people  who  are  starving  for  bread  do  not  eat 
cake.  The  fact  is  that  to  keep  within  one's 
income  to-day,  either  financially  or  vitally, 
is  an  aristocratic  luxury  that  is  absolutely 
denied  to  the  many.  Most  men  —  the  rich 
[36  ] 


THE    BRIMMING  >CUP 

as  well  as  the  poor  — stumble  through  life  three 
parts  dead.  The  ruling  class,  if  it  had  the  will 
and  the  skill,  might  awaken  itself  to  fullness 
of  life.  But  only  a  comparatively  few  of  the 
others  could,  because  the  world  is  conducted 
on  a  principle  which  makes  it  even  less  possi- 
ble for  them  to  store  up  a  little  hoard  of 
vitality  in  their  bodies  against  a  rainy  day 
than  to  store  up  an  overplus  of  dollars  in  the 
savings  bank. 

I  think  that  this  state  of  things  is  very 
different  from  the  one  which  the  fathers 
contemplated  in  founding  our  nation.  When 
they  undertook  to  secure  for  us  all  "life, 
liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness,"  they 
did  not  mean  a  bare  clinging  to  existence, 
liberty  to  starve,  and  the  pursuit  of  a  nimble 
happiness  by  the  lame,  the  halt,  and  the  blind. 
They  meant  fullness  of  life,  liberty  hi  the 
broadest  sense,  both  outer  and  inner,  and  that 
almost  certain  success  in  the  attainment  of 
happiness  which  these  two  guarantee  a  man. 
In  a  word,  the  fathers  meant  to  offer  us 
[  37  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

all  a  good  long  draft  of  the  brimming  cup 
with  the  full  sum  of  benefits  implied  by  that 
privilege.  For  the  vitalized  man  possesses 
real  life  and  liberty,  and  finds  happiness 
usually  at  his  disposal  without  putting  him- 
self to  the  trouble  of  pursuit. 

I  can  imagine  the  good  fathers'  chagrin  if 
they  are  aware  to-day  of  how  things  have 
gone  on  in  then*  republic.  Perhaps  they 
realize  that  the  possibility  of  exuberance  has 
now  become  a  special  privilege.  And  if  they 
are  still  as  wise  as  they  once  were,  they  will 
be  doubly  exasperated  by  this  state  of  affairs 
because  they  will  see  that  it  is  needless.  It 
has  been  proved  over  and  over  again  that 
modern  machinery  has  removed  all  real  neces- 
sity for  poverty  and  overwork.  There  is 
enough  to  go  'round.  Under  a  more  demo- 
cratic system  we  might  have  enough  of  the 
necessities  and  reasonable  comforts  of  life  to 
supply  each  of  the  hundred  million  Americans, 
if  every  man  did  no  more  than  a  wholesome 
amount  of  productive  labor  in  a  day  and  had 
[  38  ] 


THE    BRIMMING    CUP 

the  rest  of  his  time  for  constructive  leisure 
and  real  living. 

On  the  same  terms  there  is  likewise  enough 
exuberance  to  go  'round.  The  only  obstacle 
to  placing  it  within  the  reach  of  all  exists  in 
men's  minds.  Men  are  still  too  inert  and 
blindly  conservative  to  stand  up  together 
and  decree  that  industry  shall  be  no  longer 
conducted  for  the  inordinate  profit  of  the 
few,  but  for  the  use  of  the  many.  Until  that 
day  comes,  the  possibility  of  exuberance  will 
remain  a  special  privilege. 

In  the  mean  while  it  is  too  bad  that  the 
favored  classes  do  not  make  more  use  of  this 
privilege.  It  is  absurd  that  such  large  num- 
bers of  them  are  still  as  far  from  exuberance 
as  the  unprivileged.  They  keep  reducing  their 
overplus  of  vitality  to  an  under-minus  of  it 
by  too  much  work  and  too  foolish  play,  by 
plain  thinking  and  high  living  and  the  dissi- 
pation of  maintaining  a  pace  too  swift  for 
their  as  yet  unadjusted  organisms.  They  keep 
their  house  of  life  always  a  little  chilly  by 
[  39  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

opening  the  windows  before  the  furnace  has 
had  a  chance  to  take  the  chill  out  of  the 
rooms. 

If  we  would  bring  joy  to  the  masses  why 
not  first  vitalize  the  classes?  If  the  latter 
can  be  led  to  develop  a  fondness  for  that 
brimming  cup  which  is  theirs  for  the  asking, 
a  long  step  will  be  taken  toward  the  possi- 
bility of  overflowing  life  for  all.  The  classes 
will  come  to  realize  that,  even  from  a  selfish 
point  of  view,  democracy  is  desirable;  that 
because  man  is  a  social  animal,  the  best-being 
of  the  one  is  inseparable  from  the  best-being 
of  the  many;  that  no  one  can  be  perfectly 
exuberant  until  all  are  exuberant.  Jean 
Finot  is  right:  "True  happiness  is  so  much  the 
greater  and  deeper  in  the  proportion  that  it 
embraces  and  unites  in  a  fraternal  chain 
more  men,  more  countries,  more  worlds." 

But  the  classes  may  also  be  moved  by  in- 
stincts less  selfish.  For  the  brimming  cup  has 
this  at  least  in  common  with  the  cup  that 
inebriates:  its  possessor  is  usually  filled  with  a 
[  40  ] 


THE    BRIMMING    CUP 

generous  —  if  sometimes  maudlin  —  anxiety 
to  have  others  enjoy  his  own  form  of  bever- 
age. The  present  writer  is  a  case  in  point. 
His  reason  for  making  this  book  lay  in  a  con- 
vivial desire  to  share  with  as  many  as  possible 
the  contents  of  a  newly  acquired  brimming 
cup.  Before  getting  hold  of  this  cup,  the 
writer  would  have  looked  with  an  indifferent 
and  perhaps  hostile  eye  upon  the  proposition 
to  make  such  a  blessing  generally  available. 
But  now  he  cannot  for  the  life  of  him  see 
how  any  one  whose  body,  mind,  and  spirit 
are  alive  and  reasonably  healthy  can  help 
wishing  the  same  jolly  good  fortune  for  all 
mankind. 

Horace  Traubel  records  that  the  aged  Walt 
Whitman  was  once  talking  philosophy  with 
some  of  his  friends  when  an  intensely  bored 
youngster  slid  down  from  his  high  chair  and 
remarked  to  nobody  in  particular:  "There's 
too  much  old  folk  here  for  me!" 

"For  me,  too,"  cried  the  poet  with  one  of 
his  hearty  laughs.  "We  are  all  of  us  a  good 
[41  ] 


THE   JOYFUL   HEART 

deal  older  than  we  need  to  be,  than  we  think 
we  are.    Let's  all  get  young  again." 

Even  so!  Here's  to  eternal  youth  for  every 
one.  And  here's  to  the  hour  when  we  may 
catch  the  eye  of  humanity  and  pledge  all 
brother  men  in  the  brimming  cup. 


E 


Ill 

ENTHUSIASM 

NTHUSIASM  is  exuberance-with-a-mo- 


tive.  It  is  the  power  that  makes  the 
world  go  'round.  The  old  Greeks  who  christ- 
ened it  knew  that  it  was  the  god-energy  in 
the  human  machine.  Without  its  driving  force 
nothing  worth  doing  has  ever  been  done.  It 
is  man's  dearest  possession.  Love,  friendship, 
religion,  altruism,  devotion  to  hobby  or 
career  —  all  these,  and  most  of  the  other  good 
things  in  life,  are  forms  of  enthusiasm.  A 
medicine  for  the  most  diverse  ills,  it  alleviates 
both  the  pains  of  poverty  and  the  boredom 
of  riches.  Apart  from  it  man's  heart  is  seldom 
joyful.  Therefore  it  should  be  husbanded 
with  zeal  and  spent  with  wisdom. 

To  waste  it  is  folly;  to  misuse  it,  disaster. 
Por  it  is  safe  to  utilize  this  god-energy  only 
in  its  own  proper  sphere.    Enthusiasm  moves 
[43] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

the  human  vessel.  To  let  it  move  the  rudder, 
too,  is  criminal  negligence.  Brahms  once 
made  a  remark  somewhat  to  this  effect:  The 
reason  why  there  is  so  much  bad  music  in 
the  world  is  that  composers  are  hi  too  much  of 
a  hurry.  When  an  inspiration  comes  to  them, 
what  do  they  do?  Instead  of  taking  it  out  for 
a  long,  cool  walk,  they  sit  down  at  once  to 
work  it  up,  but  let  it  work  them  up  instead  into 
an  absolutely  uncritical  enthusiasm  in  which 
every  splutter  of  the  goose-quill  looks  to  them 
like  part  of  a  swan-song. 

Love  is  blind,  they  say.  This  is  an  exag- 
geration. But  it  is  based  on  the  fact  that  en- 
thusiasm, whether  it  appears  as  love,  or  hi 
any  other  form,  always  has  trouble  with  its 
eyes.  In  its  own  place  it  is  incomparably 
efficient;  only  keep  it  away  from  the  pilot- 
house! 

Since  this  god-energy  is  the  most  precious 

and  important  thing  that  we  have,  why  should 

our  word  for  its  possessor  have  sunk  almost 

to    the    level    of    a    contemptuous    epithet? 

[44  ] 


ENTHUSIASM 

Nine  times  in  ten  we  apply  it  to  the  man  who 
allows  his  enthusiasm  to  steer  his  vessel.  It 
would  be  full  as  logical  to  employ  the  word 
"writer"  for  one  who  misuses  his  literary  gift 
in  writing  dishonest  advertisements.  When 
we  speak  of  an  "enthusiast"  to-day,  we 
usually  mean  a  person  who  has  all  the  ill- 
judging  impulsiveness  of  a  child  without  its 
compensating  charm,  and  is  therefore  not  to 
be  taken  seriously.  "  He  's  only  an  enthu- 
siast! "  This  has  been  said  about  Columbus 
and  Christ  and  every  other  great  man  who 
ever  lived. 

But  besides  its  poor  sense  of  distance 
and  direction,  men  have  another  complaint 
against  enthusiasm.  They  think  it  insincere 
on  account  of  its  capacity  for  frequent  and 
violent  fluctuation  in  temperature.  In  his 
"Creative  Evolution,"  Bergson  shows  how 
"our  most  ardent  enthusiasm,  as  soon  as  it 
is  externalized  into  action,  is  so  naturally 
congealed  into  the  cold  calculation  of  interest 
or  vanity,  the  one  so  easily  takes  the  shape  of 
[  45  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

the  other,  that  we  might  confuse  them  to- 
gether, doubt  our  own  sincerity,  deny  good- 
ness and  love,  if  we  did  not  know  that  the 
dead  retain  for  a  time  the  features  of  the 
living." 

The  philosopher  then  goes  on  to  show  how, 
when  we  fall  into  this  confusion,  we  are  un- 
just to  enthusiasm,  which  is  the  materializa- 
tion of  the  invisible  breath  of  life  itself.  It 
is  "the  spirit."  The  action  it  induces  is  "the 
letter."  These  constitute  two  different  and 
often  antagonistic  movements.  The  letter 
kills  the  spirit.  But  when  this  occurs  we  are 
apt  to  mistake  the  slayer  for  the  slain  and 
impute  to  the  ardent  spirit  all  the  cold  vices 
of  its  murderer.  Hence,  the  taint  of  insin- 
cerity that  seems  to  hang  about  enthusiasm 
is,  after  all,  nothing  but  illusion.  To  be  just 
we  should  discount  this  illusion  hi  advance 
as  the  wise  man  discounts  discouragement. 
And  the  epithet  for  the  man  whose  lungs  are 
large  with  the  breath  of  life  should  cease  to 
be  a  term  of  reproach. 

[  46] 


ENTHUSIASM 

Enthusiasm  is  the  prevailing  characteristic 
of  the  child  and  of  the  adult  who  does  memor- 
able things.  The  two  are  near  of  kin  and  bear 
a  family  resemblance.  Youth  trails  clouds 
of  glory.  Glory  often  trails  clouds  of  youth. 
Usually  the  eternal  man  is  the  eternal  boy; 
and  the  more  of  a  boy  he  is,  the  more  of  a 
man.  The  most  conventional-seeming  great 
men  possess  as  a  rule  a  secret  vein  of  eternal- 
boyishness.  Our  idea  of  Brahms,  for  example, 
is  of  a  person  hopelessly  mature  and  respect- 
able. But  we  open  Kalbeck's  new  biography 
and  discover  him  climbing  a  tree  to  conduct 
his  chorus  while  swaying  upon  a  branch;  or, 
hi  his  fat  forties,  playing  at  frog-catching  like 
a  five-year-old. 

The  prominent  American  is  no  less  youth- 
ful. Not  long  ago  one  of  our  good  gray  men 
of  letters  was  among  his  children,  awaiting 
dinner  and  his  wife.  Her  footsteps  sounded 
on  the  stairs.  "Quick,  children!"  he  ex- 
claimed. "Here's  mother.  Let's  hide  under 
the  table  and  when  she  comes  in  we'll  rush 
[  47  1 


THE   JOYFUL   HEART 

out  on  all-fours  and  pretend  we're  bears." 
The  maneuver  was  executed  with  spirit.  At 
the  preconcerted  signal,  out  they  all  waddled 
and  galumphed  with  horrid  grunts  —  only 
to  find  something  unfamiliar  about  mother's 
skirt,  and,  glancing  up,  to  discover  that  it 
hung  upon  a  strange  and  terrified  guest. 

The  biographers  have  paid  too  little  atten- 
tion to  the  god-energy  of  their  heroes.  I 
think  that  it  should  be  one  of  the  crowning 
achievements  of  biography  to  communicate 
to  the  reader  certain  actual  vibrations  of  the 
enthusiasm  that  filled  the  scientist  or  philos- 
opher for  truth;  the  patriot  for  his  country; 
the  artist  for  beauty  and  self-expression;  the 
altruist  for  humanity;  the  discoverer  for 
knowledge;  the  lover  or  friend  for  a  kindred 
soul;  the  prophet,  martyr,  or  saint  for  his 
god. 

Every  lover,  according  to  Emerson,  is  a 

poet.    Not  only  is  this  true,  but  every  one  of 

us,  when  hi  the  sway  of  any  enthusiasm,  has 

in    him    something    creative.  '  Therefore    a 

[  48  ] 


ENTHUSIASM 

record  of  the  most  ordinary  person's  enthu- 
siasms should  prove  as  well  worth  reading  as 
the  ordinary  record  we  have  of  the  extra- 
ordinary person's  life  if  written  with  the  usual 
neglect  of  this  important  subject.  Now  I 
should  like  to  try  the  experiment  of  sketch- 
ing in  outline  a  new  kind  of  biography.  It 
would  consist  entirely  of  the  record  of  an 
ordinary  person's  enthusiasms.  But,  as  I 
know  no  other  life-story  so  well  as  my  own, 
perhaps  the  reader  will  pardon  me  for  abiding 
in  the  first  person  singular.  He  may  grant 
pardon  the  more  readily  if  he  realizes  the 
universality  of  this  offense  among  writers. 
For  it  is  a  fact  that  almost  all  novels,  stories, 
poems,  and  essays  are  only  more  or  less 
cleverly  disguised  autobiography.  So  here 
follow  some  of  my  enthusiasms  in  a  new 
chapter. 


IV 

A   CHAPTER   OF   ENTHUSIASMS 
I 

E  looking  back  over  my  own  life,  a  series 
jf  enthusiasms  would  appear  to  stand  out 
as  a  sort  of  spinal  system,  about  which  are 
grouped  as  tributaries  all  the  dry  bones  and 
other  minor  phenomena  of  existence.  Or, 
rather,  enthusiasm  is  the  deep,  clear,  spark- 
ling stream  which  carries  along  and  solves  and 
neutralizes,  if  not  sweetens,  in  its  impetuous 
flow  life's  rubbish  and  superfluities  of  all 
kinds,  such  as  school,  the  Puritan  Sabbath, 
boot  and  hair-brushing,  polite  and  unpolemic 
converse  with  bores,  prigs,  pedants,  and 
shorter  catechists  —  and  so  on  all  the  way 
down  between  the  shores  of  age  to  the  higher 
mathematics,  bank  failures,  and  the  occa- 
sional editor  whose  word  is  not  as  good  as  his 
bond. 

[  501 


A    CHAPTER    OF    ENTHUSIASMS 

My  first  enthusiasm  was  for  good  things 
to  eat.  It  was  stimulated  by  that  priceless 
asset,  a  virginal  palate.  But  here  at  once 
the  medium  of  expression  fails.  For  what 
may  words  presume  to  do  with  the  flavor  of 
that  first  dish  of  oatmeal;  with  the  first  pear, 
grape,  watermelon;  with  the  Bohemian  roll 
called  Hooska,  besprinkled  with  poppy  and 
mandragora;  or  the  wondrous  dishes  which 
our  Viennese  cook  called  Aepfelstmdel  and 
Scheiterhaufen?  The  best  way  for  me  to 
express  my  reaction  to  each  of  these  delica- 
cies would  be  to  play  it  on  the  'cello.  The 
next  best  would  be  to  declare  that  they  tasted 
somewhat  better  than  Eve  thought  the  apple 
was  going  to  taste.  But  how  absurdly  in- 
adequate this  sounds!  I  suppose  the  truth  is 
that  such  enthusiasms  have  become  too  utterly 
congealed  in  our  blase  minds  when  at  last  these 
minds  have  grown  mature  enough  to  grasp  the 
principles  of  penmanship.  So  that  whatever 
has  been  recorded  about  the  sensations  of  ex- 
treme youth  is  probably  all  false.  Why,  even 
[51  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

"Heaven  lies  about  us  in  our  infancy,"  — 

as  Wordsworth  revealed  in  his  "  Ode 
on  Immortality."  And  though  Tennyson 
pointed  out  that  we  try  to  revenge  our- 
selves by  lying  about  heaven  in  our  ma- 
turity, this  does  not  serve  to  correct  a  single 
one  of  crabbed  age's  misapprehensions  about 
youth. 

Games  next  inflamed  my  fancy.  More 
than  dominoes  or  Halma,  lead  soldiers  ap- 
pealed to  me,  and  tops,  marbles,  and  battle- 
dore and  shuttlecock.  Through  tag,  fire- 
engine,  pom-pom-pull-away,  hide-and-seek, 
baseball,  and  boxing,  I  came  to  tennis,  which 
I  knew  instinctively  was  to  be  my  athletic 
grand  passion.  Perhaps  I  was  first  attracted 
by  the  game's  constant  humor  which  was  for- 
ever making  the  ball  imitate  or  caricature 
humanity,  or  beguiling  the  players  to  act  like 
solemn  automata.  For  children  are  usually 
quicker  than  grown-ups  to  see  these  droll 
resemblances.  I  came  by  degrees  to  like  the 
game's  variety,  its  tense  excitement,  its  beauty 
[52] 


A    CHAPTER    OF    ENTHUSIASMS 

of  posture  and  curve.  And  before  long  I 
vaguely  felt  what  I  later  learned  consciously: 
that  tennis  is  a  sure  revealer  of  character. 
Three  sets  with  a  man  suffice  to  give  one  a 
working  knowledge  of  his  moral  equipment; 
six,  of  his  chief  mental  traits;  and  a  dozen, 
of  that  most  important,  and  usually  veiled 
part  of  him,  his  subconscious  personality. 
Young  people  of  opposite  sexes  are  sometimes 
counseled  to  take  a  long  railway  journey 
together  before  deciding  on  a  matrimonial 
merger.  But  I  would  respectfully  advise 
them  rather  to  play  "singles"  with  each  other 
before  venturing  upon  a  continuous  game  of 
doubles. 

The  collecting  mania  appeared  some  time 
before  tennis.  I  first  collected  ferns  under  a 
crag  in  a  deep  glen.  Mere  amassing  soon 
gave  way  to  discrimination,  which  led  to 
picking  out  a  favorite  fern.  This  was  chosen, 
I  now  realize,  with  a  woeful  lack  of  fine  feel- 
ing. I  called  it  "The  Alligator"  from  its 
fancied  resemblance  to  my  brother's  alli- 
[53  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

gator-skin  traveling-bag.  But  admiration  of 
this  fern  brought  a  dawning  consciousness 
that  certain  natural  objects  were  preferable 
to  others.  This  led,  in  years,  to  an  enthu- 
siasm for  collecting  impressions  of  the  beauty, 
strength,  sympathy,  and  significance  of 
nature.  The  Alligator  fern,  as  I  still  call  it, 
has  become  a  symbolic  thing  to  me;  and  the 
sight  of  it  now  stands  for  my  supreme  or 
best-loved  impression,  not  alone  in  the  world 
of  ferns,  but  also  in  each  department  of  na- 
ture. Among  forests  it  symbolizes  the  im- 
memorial incense  cedars  and  redwoods  of  the 
Yosemite;  among  shores,  those  of  Capri  and 
Monterey;  among  mountains,  the  glowing  one 
called  Isis  as  seen  at  dawn  from  the  depths 
of  the  Grand  Canon. 

II 

Next,  I  collected  postage-stamps.    I  know 

that  it  is  customary  to-day  for  writers  to 

sneer  at  this  pursuit.     But  surely  they  have 

forgotten  its  variety  and  subtlety;  its  demand 

[  54  ] 


A    CHAPTER    OF    ENTHUSIASMS 

on  the  imagination;  how  it  makes  history  and 
geography  live,  and  initiates  one  painlessly 
into  the  mysteries  of  the  currency  of  all 
nations.  Then  what  a  tonic  it  is  for  the 
memory!  Only  think  of  the  implications  of 
the  annual  price-catalogue!  Soon  after  the 
issue  of  this  work,  every  collector  worthy 
the  name  has  almost  unconsciously  filed  away 
in  his  mind  the  current  market  values  of 
thousands  of  stamps.  And  he  can  tell  you 
offhand,  not  only  then*  worth  in  the  normal 
perforated  and  canceled  condition,  but  also 
how  then*  values  vary  if  they  are  uncanceled, 
unperforated,  embossed,  rouletted,  surcharged 
with  all  manner  of  initials,  printed  by  mistake 
with  the  king  standing  on  his  head,  or  water- 
marked anything  from  a  horn  of  plenty  to 
the  seven  lean  kine  of  Egypt.  This  feat  of 
memory  is,  moreover,  no  hardship  at  all, 
for  the  enthusiasm  of  the  normal  stamp- 
collector  is  so  potent  that  its  proprietor 
has  only  to  stand  by  and  let  it  do  all  the 
work. 

[  55  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

We  often  hear  that  the  wealthy  do  not 
enjoy  their  possessions.  This  depends  entirely 
upon  the  wealthy.  That  some  of  them  enjoy 
their  treasures  giddily,  madly,  my  own  ex- 
perience proves.  For,  as  youthful  stamp- 
collectors  went  in  those  days,  I  was  a  phila- 
telic magnate.  By  inheritance,  by  the  ceaseless 
and  passionate  trading  of  duplicates,  by 
rummaging  in  every  available  attic,  by  cor- 
respondence with  a  wide  circle  of  foreign 
missionaries,  and  by  delivering  up  my  whole 
allowance,  to  the  dealers,  I  had  amassed  a 
collection  of  several  thousand  varieties. 
Among  these  were  such  gems  as  all  of  the 
triangular  Cape  of  Good  Hopes,  almost  all  of 
the  early  Persians,  and  our  own  spectacular 
issue  of  1869  unused,  including  the  one 
on  which  the  silk-stockinged  fathers  are 
signing  the  Declaration  of  Independence. 
Such  possessions  as  these  I  well-nigh  wor- 
shiped. 

Even    to-day,    after    having    collected    no 
stamps  for  a  generation,  the  chance  sight  of 
[56  ] 


A    CHAPTER    OF    ENTHUSIASMS 

an  "approval  sheet,"  with  its  paper-hinged 
reminders  of  every  land,  gives  me  a  curious 
sensation.  There  visit  my  spine  echoes  of 
the  thrills  that  used  to  course  it  on  similar 
occasions  in  boyhood.  These  were  the  days 
when  my  stamps  had  formed  for  me  mental 
pictures  —  more  or  less  accurate  —  of  each 
country  from  Angola  to  Zululand,  its  history, 
climate,  scenery,  inhabitants,  and  rulers.  To 
possess  its  rarest  stamp  was  mysteriously 
connected  in  my  mind  with  being  given  the 
freedom  of  the  land  itself,  and  introduced 
with  warm  recommendations  to  its  genius 
loci. 

Even  old  circulars  issued  by  dealers,  now 
long  gone  to  stampless  climes,  have  power 
still  to  raise  the  ghost  of  the  vanished  glamour. 
I  prefer  those  of  foreign  dealers  because  their 
English  has  the  quaint,  other-world  atmos- 
phere of  what  they  dealt  in.  The  other  day 
I  found  in  an  old  scrapbook  a  circular  from 
Vienna,  which  annihilated  a  score  of  years 
with  its  very  first  words: 
[57] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 
CLEARING 

OP  A  LARGE  PART  OF  MY  RETAIL  DEPOSITORY 

Being  lately  so  much  engaged  into  my  whole- 
sale business  ...  I  have  made  up  my  mind  to 
sell  out  a  large  post  of  my  retail-stamps  at  under- 
prices.  They  are  rests  of  larger  collections  con- 
taining for  the  most,  only  older  marks  and  not 
thrash  possibly  put  together  purposedly  as  they 
used  to  be  composed  by  the  other  dealers  and  con- 
taining therefore  mostly  but  worthless  and  use- 
less nouveautes  of  Central  America. 

Before  continuing  this  persuasive  flow,  the 
dealer  inserts  a  number  of  testimonials  like  the 
following.  He  calls  them: 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

Sent  package  having  surpassed  my  expertations 
I  beg  to  remit  by  to  days  post-office-ordres  Mk. 
100.  Kindly  please  send  me  by  return  of  post 
offered  album  wanted  for  retail  sale. 

G.  B  —  HANNOVER. 

The  dealer  now  comes  to  his  peroration: 

I  beg  to  call  the  kind  of  attention  of  every  buyer 
to  the  fact  of  my  selling  all  these  packages  and 
albums  with  my  own  loss  merely  for  clearings 

[  58  ] 


A    CHAPTER    OF    ENTHUSIASMS 

sake  of  my  retail  business  and  in  order  to  get  rid 
of  them  as  much  and  as  soon  as  possible.  With 
25-60  %  abatement  I  give  stamps  and  whole 
things  to  societies  against  four  weeks  calculation. 
All  collectors  are  bound  to  oblige  themselves 
by  writing  contemporaneously  with  sending  in 
the  depository  amount  to  make  calculation  within 
a  week  as  latest  term. 

It  is  enough!  As  I  read,  the  old  magic  en- 
folds me,  and  I  am  seized  with  longing  to 
turn  myself  into  a  society  of  collectors  and 
to  implore  the  altruistic  dealer  "kindly  please" 
to  send  me,  at  a  prodigious  "abatement," 
"stamps  and  whole  things  against  four  weeks 
calculation." 

nr 

The  youngest  children  of  large  families 
are  apt  to  be  lonely  folk,  somewhat  retired 
and  individualistic  in  their  enthusiasms.  I 
was  such  a  child,  blessed  by  circumstances 
with  few  playfellows  and  rather  inclined  to 
sedentary  joys.  Even  when  I  reached  the 
barbaric  stage  of  evolution  where  youth  is 
gripped  by  enthusiasm  for  the  main  pursuits 
[  59] 


of  his  primitive  ancestors,  I  was  fain  to  enjoy 
these  in  the  more  sophisticated  forms  natural 
to  a  lonely  young  city-dweller. 

When  stamps  had  passed  their  zenith  I  was 
filled  with  a  lust  for  slaughter.  Fish  were  at 
first  the  desired  victims.  Day  after  day  I 
sat  watching  a  hopelessly  buoyant  cork  re- 
fuse to  bob  into  the  depths  of  the  muddy  and 
torpid  Cuyahoga.  I  was  like  some  fond  par- 
ent, hoping  against  hope  to  see  his  child  out- 
live the  flippant  period  and  dive  beneath  the 
surface  of  things,  into  touch  with  the  great 
living  realities.  And  when  the  cork  finally 
marked  a  historic  epoch  by  vanishing,  and 
a  small,  inert,  and  intensely  bored  sucker  was 
pulled  in  hand  over  hand,  I  felt  thrills  of 
gratified  longing  and  conquest  old  and  strong 
as  the  race. 

But  presently  I  myself  was  drawn,  like  the 
cork,  beneath  the  superficial  surface  of  the 
angler's  art.  For  in  the  public  library  I 
chanced  on  a  shelf  of  books,  that  told  about 
fishing  of  a  nobler,  jollier,  more  seductive 
[  601 


A    CHAPTER    OF    ENTHUSIASMS 

sort.    At  once  I  was  consumed  with  a  passion 
for  five-ounce  split-bamboo  fly-rods,  ethereal 
leaders,  double-tapered  casting-lines  of  braided 
silk,  and  artificial  flies  more  fair  than  birds 
of  paradise.    Armed  in  spirit,  with  all  these, 
I  waded  the  streams  of  England  with  kindly 
old  Isaak  Walton,  and  ranged  the  Restigouche 
with  the  predecessors  of  Henry  van  Dyke. 
These  dreams  brought  with  them  a  certain 
amount    of    satisfaction  —  about    as    much 
satisfaction  as  if  they  had  come  as  guests  to 
a  surprise  party,  each  equipped  with  a  small 
sandwich  and  a  large  appetite.     The  visions 
were  pleasant,  of  course,  but  they  cried  out, 
and  made  me  cry  out,  for  action.    There  were 
no  trout,  to  be  sure,  within  a  hundred  miles, 
and  there   was  no   way   of  getting  to   any 
trouty  realm  of  delight.     But  I  did  what  I 
could  to  be  prepared  for  the  blessed  hour  when 
we  should  meet.     I  secured  five  new  sub- 
scriptions or  so  to  "The  Boys'  Chronicle'* 
(let  us  call  it),  and  received  in  return  a  fly-rod 
so  flimsy  that  it  would  have  resolved  itself 
[  61  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

into  its  elements  at  sight  of  a  half-pound 
trout.  It  was  destined,  though,  never  to 
meet  with  this  embarrassment. 

My  casting-line  bore  a  family  resemblance 
to  grocery  string.  My  leader  was  a  piece  of 
gut  from  my  brother's  'cello;  my  flybook,  an 
old  wallet.  As  for  flies,  they  seemed  beyond 
my  means;  and  it  was  perplexing  to  know 
what  to  do,  until  I  found  a  book  which  said 
that  it  was  better  by  far  to  tie  your  own  flies. 
With  joyful  relief  I  acted  on  this  counsel. 
Plucking  the  feather-duster,  I  tied  two  White 
Millers  with  shoe-thread  upon  cod-hooks. 
One  of  these  I  stained  and  streaked  with 
my  heart's  blood  into  the  semblance  of  a 
Parmacheene  Belle.  The  canary  furnished 
materials  for  a  Yellow  May;  a  dooryard 
English  sparrow,  for  a  Brown  Hackle.  My 
masterpiece,  the  beautiful,  parti-colored  fly 
known  as  Jock  Scott,  owed  its  being  to  my 
sister's  Easter  bonnet. 

I  covered   the  points  of  the  hooks  with 
pieces  of  cork,  and  fished  on  the  front  lawn 
[  62  ] 


A    CHAPTER    OF    ENTHUSIASMS 

from  morning  to  night,  leaning  with  difficulty 
against  the  thrust  of  an  imaginary  torrent. 
And  I  never  ceased  striving  to  make  the  three 
flies  straighten  out  properly  as  the  books 
directed,  and  fall  like  thistledown  upon  the 
strategic  spot  where  the  empty  tomato  can 
was  anchored,  and  then  jiggle  appetizingly 
down  over  the  four-pounder,  where  he 
sulked  in  the  deep  hole  just  beyond  the 
hydrant. 

The  hunting  fever  was  wakened  by  the 
need  for  the  Brown  Hackle  already  mentioned. 
But  as  the  choice  of  weapons  and  of  victims 
culminated  in  the  air-gun  and  the  sparrow, 
respectively,  my  earliest  hunting  was  confined 
even  more  closely  than  my  fishing  to  the 
library  and  the  dense  and  teeming  forests  of 
the  imagination. 

But  while  somewhat  handicapped  here  by 
the  scarcity  of  ferocious  game,  I  was  more 
fortunate  in  another  enthusiasm  which  at- 
tacked me  at  almost  the  same  time.  For 
however  unpropitious  the  hunting  is  on  any 
[  63  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

given  part  of  the  earth's  surface,  there  is 
everywhere  and  always  an  abundance  of  good 
hidden-treasure-seeking  to  be  had.  The  gar- 
den, the  attic,  the  tennis  lawn  all  suffered. 
And  my  initiative  was  strengthened  by  the 
discovery  of  an  incomparable  book  all 
about  a  dead  man's  chest,  and  not  only 
digging  for  gold  in  a  secret  island,  but 
finding  it,  too,  by  jingo!  and  fighting  off 
the  mutineers. 

These  aspirations  naturally  led  to  games  of 
Pirate,  or  Outlaw,  which  were  handicapped, 
however,  by  the  scarcity  of  playmates,  and 
their  curious  hesitation  to  serve  as  victims. 
As  pirates  and  outlaws  are  well  known  to  be 
the  most  superstitious  of  creatures,  inclining 
to  the  primitive  in  their  religious  views,  we 
were  naturally  led  into  a  sort  of  dread  en- 
thusiasm for  —  or  enthusiastic  dread  of  — 
the  whole  pantheon  of  spooks,  sprites,  and 
bugaboos  to  which  savages  and  children, 
great  and  small,  bow  the  knee.  My  dreams 
at  that  time  ran  something  like  this: 
[  64  1 


A    CHAPTER    OF    ENTHUSIASMS 


PARADISE  REVISED 

Playing  hymn-tunes  day  and  night 

On  a  harp  may  be  all  right 

For  the  grown-ups;  but  for  me, 

I  do  wish  that  heaven  could  be 

Sort  o'  like  a  circus,  run 

So  a  kid  could  have  some  fun! 

There  I  'd  not  play  harps,  but  horns 
When  I  chased  the  unicorns  — 
Magic  tubes  with  pistons  greasy, 
Slides  that  pushed  and  pulled  out  easy, 
Cylinders  of  snaky  brass 
Where  the  fingers  like  to  fuss, 
Polished  like  a  looking-glass, 
Ending  in  a  blunderbuss. 

I  would  ride  a  horse  of  steel 
Wound  up  with  a  ratchet-wheel. 
Every  beast  I  'd  put  to  rout 
Like  the  man  I  read  about. 
I  would  singe  the  leopard's  hair, 
Stalk  the  vampire  and  the  adder, 
Drive  the  werewolf  from  his  lair, 
Make  the  mad  gorilla  madder. 
Needle-guns  my  work  should  do. 
But,  if  beasts  got  closer  to, 
I  would  pierce  them  to  the  marrow 
With  a  barbed  and  poisoned  arrow, 
Or  I  'd  whack  'em  on  the  skull 
Till  my  scimiter  was  dull. 

[  65  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

If  these  weapons  did  n't  work, 

With  a  kris  or  bowie-knife, 

Poniard,  assegai,  or  dirk, 

I  would  make  them  beg  for  life;  — 

Spare  them,  though,  if  they  'd  be  good 

And  guard  me  from  what  haunts  the  wood 

From  those  creepy,  shuddery  sights 

That  come  round  a  fellow  nights  — 

Imps  that  squeak  and  trolls  that  prowl, 

Ghouls,  the  slimy  devil-fowl, 

Headless  goblins  with  lassoes, 

Scarlet  witches  worse  than  those, 

Flying  dragon-fish  that  bellow 

So  as  most  to  scare  a  fellow.  .  . . 

There,  as  nearly  as  I  could, 

I  would  live  like  Robin  Hood, 

Taking  down  the  mean  and  haughty, 

Getting  plunder  from  the  naughty 

To  reward  all  honest  men 

Who  should  seek  my  outlaw's  den. 

When  I  'd  wearied  of  these  pleasures 
I  'd  go  hunt  for  hidden  treasures  — 
In  no  ordinary  way, 
Pirates'  luggers  I  'd  waylay; 
Board  them  from  my  sinking  dory, 
Wade  through  decks  of  gore  and  glory, 
Drive  the  fiends,  with  blazing  matchlock, 
Down  below,  and  snap  the  hatch-lock. 

Next,  I  'd  scud  beneath  the  sky-land, 
Sight  the  hills  of  Treasure  Island, 

[  66  ] 


A    CHAPTER    OF    ENTHUSIASMS 

Prowl  and  peer  and  prod  and  prise, 
Till  there  burst  upon  my  eyes 
Just  the  proper  pirate's  freight: 
Gold  doubloons  and  pieces  of  eight! 

Then  —  the  very  best  of  all  — 
Suddenly  a  stranger  tall 
Would  appear,  and  I  'd  forget 
That  we  hadn't  ever  met. 
And  with  cap  upthrown  I  'd  greet  him 
(Turning  from  the  plunder,  yellow) 
And  I'd  hurry  fast  to  meet  him, 
For  he  'd  be  the  very  fellow 
Who,  I  think,  invented  fun  — 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson. 

The  enthusiasms  of  this  barbaric  period 
never  died.  They  grew  up,  instead,  and 
proved  serviceable  friends.  Fishing  and  hunt- 
ing are  now  the  high-lights  of  vacation  time. 
The  crude  call  of  the  weird  and  the  inex- 
plicable has  modulated  into  a  siren  note  from 
the  forgotten  psychic  continents  which  we 
Western  peoples  have  only  just  discovered 
and  begun  to  explore.  As  for  the  buried 
treasure  craze  —  why,  my  life-work  prac- 
tically amounts  to  a  daily  search  for  hidden 
valuables  in  the  cellars  and  attics,  the 
[  67  1 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

chimney-pieces  and  desert  islands  of  the 
mind,  and  secret  attempts  to  coin  them 
into  currency. 

And  so  I  might  go  on  to  tell  of  my  enthu- 
siasms for  no  end  of  other  things  like  reading, 
modeling,  folk-lore,  cathedrals,  writing,  pic- 
tures, and  the  theater.  Then  there  is  the 
long  story  of  that  enthusiasm  called  Love,  of 
Friendship  its  twin,  and  their  elder  brother, 
Religion,  and  their  younger  sister,  Altruism. 
And  travel  and  adventure  and  so  on.  But  no! 
It  is,  I  believe,  a  misdemeanor  to  obtain  at- 
tention under  false  pretenses.  If  I  have  caught 
the  reader's  eye  by  promising  to  illustrate  in 
outline  a  new  method  of  writing  autobio- 
graphy, I  must  not  abuse  his  confidence  by 
putting  that  method  into  practice.  So,  with 
a  regret  almost  equal  to  that  of  Lewis  Carroll's 
famous  Bellman  — 

I  skip  twenty  years  — 
and  close  with  my  latest  enthusiasm. 

[  68  ] 


A    CHAPTER    OF    ENTHUSIASMS 

IV 

Confirmed  wanderers  that  we  were,  my 
wife  and  I  had  rented  a  house  for  the  winter 
in  a  Massachusetts  coast  village  and  had 
fallen  somewhat  under  the  spell  of  the  place. 
Nevertheless,  we  had  decided  to  move  on 
soon  —  to  try,  in  fact,  another  trip  through 
Italy.  Our  friendly  neighbors  urged  us  to 
buy  land  up  the  "back  lane"  instead,  and 
build  and  settle  down.  We  knew  nothing  of 
this  region,  however,  and  scarcely  heard  them. 

But  they  were  so  insistent  that  one  day  we 
ventured  up  the  back  lane  at  dusk  and  began 
to  explore  the  woods.  It  grew  dark  and  we 
thought  of  turning  back.  Then  it  began  to 
grow  light  again.  A  full  moon  was  climbing 
up  through  the  maples,  inviting  further  ex- 
plorations. We  pushed  through  a  dense 
undergrowth  and  presently  were  in  a  grove  of 
great  white  pines.  There  was  a  faint  sound  of 
running  water,  and  suddenly  we  came  upon  an 
astonishing  brook  —  wide,  swift,  and  musical. 
[  69  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

We  had  not  suspected  the  existence  of  such 
a  brook  within  a  dozen  leagues.  It  was  over- 
arched by  tall  oaks  and  elms,  beeches,  tupe- 
los,  and  maples.  The  moonbeams  were  danc- 
ing in  the  ripples  and  on  the  floating  castles 
of  foam. 

"What  a  place  for  a  study!" 

"Yes;  a  log  cabin  with  a  big  stone  fireplace." 

The  remarks  came  idly,  but  our  eyes  met 
and  held.  Moved  by  one  impulse  we  turned 
from  the  stream  and  remarked  what  bosh 
people  will  sometimes  talk,  and  discussed  the 
coming  Italian  trip  as  we  moved  cautiously 
among  the  briers.  But  when  we  came  once 
more  to  the  veteran  pines,  they  seemed  more 
glamorous  than  ever  in  the  moonlight,  es- 
pecially one  that  stood  near  a  large  holly, 
apart  from  the  rest  —  a  three-prong  lyrical 
fellow  —  and  his  opposite,  a  burly,  thickset 
archer,  bending  his  long-bow  into  a  most 
exquisite  curve.  The  fragrant  pine  needles 
whispered.  The  brook  lent  its  faint  music. 

"Quick!   We  had  better  get  away!" 
[  70  ] 


A    CHAPTER    OF    ENTHUSIASMS 

A  forgotten  lumber  road  led  us  safe  from 
briers  up  a  hill.  Out  of  a  dense  oak  grove 
we  suddenly  emerged  upon  the  more  open 
crest.  Our  feet  sank  deep  in  moss. 

"Look,"  I  said. 

Over  the  heads  of  the  high  forest  trees 
below  shimmered  a  mile  of  moonlit  marshes, 
and  beyond  them  a  gleam  —  perhaps  from 
some  vessel  far  at  sea,  perhaps  even  from  a 
Provincetown  lighthouse. 

"Yes,  but  look!" 

At  a  touch  I  faced  around  and  beheld, 
crowning  the  hill,  a  stately  company  of  red 
cedars,  comely  and  dense  and  mysterious  as 
the  cypresses  of  Tivoli,  and  gloriously  drenched 
in  moonlight. 

"But  what  a  place  for  a  house!" 

"Let's  give  up  Italy,"  was  the  answer, 
"and  make  this  wood  our  home." 

By  instinct  and  training  we  were  two  in- 
veterate wanderers.  Never  had  we  possessed 
so  much  as  a  shingle  or  a  spoonful  of  earth. 
But  the  nest-building  enthusiasm  had  us  at 
[  71  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

last.  Our  hands  met  in  compact.  As  we 
strolled  reluctantly  homeward  to  a  ten- 
o'clock  dinner  we  talked  of  road-making, 
swamps,  pneumatic  water-systems,  the  nim- 
bleness  of  dollars,  and  mountains  of  other 
difficulties.  And  we  agreed  that  the  only 
kind  of  faith  which  can  easily  remove  moun- 
tains is  the  faith  of  the  enthusiast. 


THE  AUTO-COMRADE 

HUMAN  nature  abhors  a  vacuum,  espe- 
cially a  vacuum  inside  itself.  Offer  the 
ordinary  man  a  week's  vacation  all  alone,  and 
he  will  look  as  though  you  were  offering  him 
a  cell  in  Sing  Sing. 

"There  are,"  as  Ruth  Cameron  truly  ob- 
serves, "a  great  many  people  to  whom  there 
is  no  prospect  more  terrifying  than  that  of  a 
few  hours  with  only  their  own  selves  for  com- 
pany. To  escape  that  terrible  catastrophe, 
they  will  make  friends  with  the  most  fearful 
bore  or  read  the  most  stupid  story.  ...  If 
such  people  are  marooned  a  few  hours,  not 
only  without  human  companionship,  but  even 
without  a  book  or  magazine  with  which  to 
screen  their  own  stupidity  from  themselves, 
they  are  fairly  frantic." 

If  any  one  hates  to  be  alone  with  himself, 
[  73  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

the  chances  are  that  he  has  not  much  of  any 
self  to  be  alone  with.  He  is  in  as  desolate  a 
condition  as  a  certain  Mr.  Pease  of  Oberlin, 
who,  having  lost  his  wife  and  children,  set  up 
his  own  tombstone  and  chiseled  upon  it  this 
epitaph: 

"Here  lies  the  pod. 
The  Pease  are  shelled  and  gone  to  God." 

Now,  pod-like  people  such  as  he  are  always 
solitary  wherever  other  people  are  not;  and 
there  is,  of  course,  nothing  much  more  dis- 
tressing than  solitariness.  These  people, 
however,  fall  through  sheer  ignorance  into  a 
confusion  of  thought.  They  suppose  that 
solitude  and  solitariness  are  the  same  thing. 
To  the  artist  in  life  —  to  the  wise  keeper  of 
the  joyful  heart  —  there  is  just  one  difference 
between  these  two:  it  is  the  difference  between 
heaven  and  its  antipodes.  For,  to  the  artist 
in  life,  solitude  is  solitariness  plus  the  Auto- 
Comrade. 

As  it  is  the  Auto-Comrade  who  makes  all 
the   difference,   I   shall   try   to   describe   his 
[  74  ] 


THE    AUTO-COMRADE 

appearance.  His  eyes  are  the  most  arresting 
part  of  him.  They  never  peer  stupidly  through 
great,  thick  spectacles  of  others*  making. 
They  are  scarcely  ever  closed  in  sleep,  and 
sometimes  make  their  happiest  discoveries 
during  the  small  hours.  These  hours  are 
truly  small  because  the  Auto-Comrade  often 
turns  his  eyes  into  the  lenses  of  a  moving- 
picture  machine  —  such  an  entertaining  one 
that  it  compresses  the  hours  to  seconds.  It  is 
through  constant,  alert  use  that  his  eyes  have 
become  sharp.  They  can  pierce  through  the 
rinds  of  the  toughest  personalities,  and  even 
penetrate  on  occasion  into  the  future.  They 
can  also  take  in  whole  panoramas  of  the  past 
in  one  sweeping  look.  For  they  are  of  that 
"inner"  variety  through  which  Wordsworth, 
winter  after  winter,  used  to  survey  his  daffo- 
dil-fields. "The  bliss  of  solitude,"  he  called 
them. 

The  Auto-Comrade  has  an  adjustable  brow. 
It  can  be  raised  high  enough  to  hold  and 
reverberate  and  add  rich  overtones  to,  the 
[  75  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

grandest  chords  of  thought  ever  struck  by  a 
Plato,  a  Buddha,  or  a  Kant.  The  next  instant 
it  may  easily  be  lowered  to  the  point  where 
the  ordinary  cartoon  of  commerce  or  the 
tiny  cachinnation  of  a  machine-made  Ches- 
terton paradox  will  not  ring  entirely  hollow. 
As  for  his  voice,  it  can  at  times  be  more  musi- 
cal than  Melba's  or  Caruso's.  Without  being 
raised  above  a  whisper,  it  can  girdle  the  globe. 
It  can  barely  breathe  some  delicious  new 
melody;  yet  the  thing  will  float  forth  not 
only  undiminished,  but  gathering  beauty,  sig- 
nificance, and  incisiveness  in  every  land  it 
passes  through. 

The  Auto-Comrade  is  an  erect,  wiry  young 
figure  of  an  athlete.  As  he  trades  at  the 
Seven-League  Boot  and  Shoe  Concern,  it 
never  bothers  him  to  accompany  you  on  the 
longest  tramps.  His  feet  simply  cannot  be 
tired  out.  As  for  his  hands,  they  are  always 
alert  to  give  you  a  lift  up  the  rough  places  on 
the  mountain-side.  He  has  remarkable  pres- 
ence of  body.  In  any  emergency  he  is  usually 
[  76  ] 


THE    AUTO-COMRADE 

the  best  man  on  the  spot.  He  is  at  once  seer, 
creator,  accomplishes  and  present  help  in 
time  of  trouble.  But  his  everyday  occupation 
is  that  of  entertainer.  He  is  the  joy-bringer 
—  the  Prometheus  of  pleasure.  In  his  vicin- 
ity there  is  no  such  thing  as  ennui  or  lone- 
someness.  Emerson  wrote: 

"When  I  would  spend  a  lonely  day 
Sun  and  moon  are  in  my  way." 

But  for  pals  of  the  Auto-Comrade,  not  only 
sun,  moon,  etc.,  are  in  the  way,  but  all  of  his 
own  unlimited  resources.  For  every  time  and 
season  he  has  a  fittingly  varied  repertory  of 
entertainment. 

Now  and  again  he  startles  you  by  the 
legerdemain  feat  of  snatching  brand-new 
ideas  out  of  the  blue,  like  rabbits  out  of  a  hat. 
While  you  stand  at  the  port-hole  of  your 
cabin  and  watch  the  rollers  rushing  back  to 
the  beloved  home-land  you  are  quitting,  he 
marshals  your  friends  and  acquaintances  into 
a  long  line  for  a  word  of  greeting  or  a  rapid- 
[  77] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

fire  chat,  just  as  though  you  were  some  idol 
of  the  people,  and  were  steaming  in  past  the 
Statue  of  Liberty  on  your  way  home  from 
lionizing  and  being  lionized  abroad,  and  the 
Auto-Comrade  were  the  factotum  at  your 
elbow  who  asks,  "What  name,  please?" 

After  the  friends  and  acquaintances,  he 
even  brings  up  your  betes  noires  and  dear- 
est enemies  for  inspection  and  comment. 
Strangely  enough,  viewed  in  this  way,  these 
persons  no  longer  seem  so  contemptible  or 
pernicious  or  devilish  as  they  once  did.  At 
this  point  your  factotum  rubs  your  eye-glasses 
bright  with  the  handkerchief  he  always  car- 
ries about  for  slate-cleaning  purposes,  and 
lo!  you  even  begin  to  discover  good  points 
about  the  chaps,  hitherto  unsuspected. 

Then  there  are  always  your  million-and-one 
favorite  melodies  which  nobody  but  that  all- 
around  musical  amateur,  the  Auto-Comrade, 
can  so  exquisitely  whistle,  hum,  strum,  fiddle, 
blat,  or  roar.  There  is  also  a  universeful  of 
new  ones  for  him  to  improvise.  And  he  is  the 
[  78  1 


THE    AUTO-COMRADE 

jolliest  sort  of  fellow  musician,  because,  when 
you  play  or  sing  a  duet  with  him,  you  can 
combine  with  the  exciting  give-and-take  and 
reciprocal  stimulation  of  the  duet,  the  god- 
like autocracy  of  the  solo,  its  opportunity 
for  wide,  uninterrupted,  uncoerced  self-ex- 
pression. Sometimes,  however,  in  the  first 
flush  of  escape  with  him  to  the  wilds,  you  are 
fain  to  clap  your  hand  over  his  mouth  in 
order  the  better  to  taste  the  essentially  folk- 
less  savor  of  solitude.  For  music  is  a  curi- 
ously social  art,  and  Browning  was  more  than 
half  right  when  he  said,  "Who  hears  music, 
feels  his  solitude  peopled  at  once." 

Perhaps  you  can  find  your  entertainer  a 
small  lump  of  clay  or  modeling-wax  to  thumb 
into  bad  caricatures  of  those  you  love  and 
good  ones  of  those  you  hate,  until  increasing 
facility  impels  him  to  try  and  model  not  a 
Tanagra  figurine,  for  that  would  be  unlike 
his  original  fancy,  but  a  Hoboken  figurine, 
say,  or  a  sketch  for  some  Elgin  (Illinois) 
marbles. 

[79J 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

If  you  care  anything  for  poetry  and  can 
find  him  a  stub  of  pencil  and  an  unoccupied 
cuff,  he  will  be  most  completely  in  his  element; 
for  if  there  is  any  one  occupation  more  closely 
identified  with  him  than  another,  it  is  that 
of  poet.  And  though  all  Auto-Comrades  are 
not  poets,  all  poets  are  Auto-Comrades. 
Every  poem  which  has  ever  thrilled  this  world 
or  another  has  been  written  by  the  Auto- 
Comrade  of  some  so-called  poet.  This  is  one 
reason  why  the  so-called  poets  think  so  much 
of  their  great  companions.  "Allons!  after 
the  great  companions!"  cried  old  Walt  to  his 
fellow  poets.  If  he  had  not  overtaken,  and 
held  fast  to,  his,  we  should  never  have  heard 
the  "Leaves  of  Grass"  whispering  "one  or 
two  indicative  words  for  the  future."  The 
bards  have  always  obeyed  this  call.  And 
they  have  known  how  to  value  their  Auto- 
Comrades,  too.  See,  for  example,  what  Keats 
thought  of  his: 

Though  the  most  beautiful  Creature  were  wait- 
ing for  me  at  the  end  of  a  Journey  or  a  Walk; 

[  80  ] 


THE    AUTO-COMRADE 

though  the  Carpet  were  of  Silk,  the  Curtains  of 
the  morning  Clouds;  the  chairs  and  Sofa  stuffed 
with  Cygnet's  down;  the  food  Manna,  the  Wine 
beyond  Claret,  the  Window  opening  on  Winander 
mere,  I  should  not  feel  —  or  rather  my  Happiness 
would  not  be  so  fine,  as  my  Solitude  is  sublime. 
Then  instead  of  what  I  have  described,  there  is 
a  sublimity  to  welcome  me  home  —  The  roaring 
of  the  wind  is  my  wife  and  the  Stars  through  the 
window  pane  are  my  Children.  ...  I  feel  more 
and  more  every  day,  as  my  imagination  strength- 
ens, that  I  do  not  live  in  this  world  alone  but  in 
a  thousand  worlds  —  No  sooner  am  I  alone  than 
shapes  of  epic  greatness  are  stationed  around  me, 
and  serve  my  Spirit  the  office  which  is  equivalent 
to  a  King's  body-guard.  ...  I  live  more  out  of 
England  than  in  it.  The  Mountains  of  Tartary 
are  a  favorite  lounge,  if  I  happen  to  miss  the 
Alleghany  ridge,  or  have  no  whim  for  Savoy. 

This  last  sentence  not  only  reveals  the  fact 
that  the  Auto-Comrade,  equipped  as  he  is 
with  a  wishing-mat,  is  the  very  best  cicerone 
in  the  world,  but  also  that  he  is  the  ideal 
tramping  companion.  Suppose  you  are  moun- 
tain-climbing. As  you  start  up  into  "na- 
ture's observatory,"  he  kneels  in  the  dust  and 
fastens  wings  upon  your  feet.  He  conveniently 
I  81  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

adjusts  a  microscope  to  your  hat-brim,  and 
hangs  about  your  neck  an  excellent  telescope. 
He  has  enough  sense,  too,  to  keep  his  mouth 
closed.  For,  like  Hazlitt,  he  "can  see  no  wit 
in  walking  and  talking."  The  joy  of  existence, 
you  find,  rarely  tastes  more  cool  and  sweet 
and  sparkling  than  when  you  and  your  Auto- 
Comrade  make  a  picnic  thus,  swinging  in  a 
basket  between  you  a  real,  live  thought  for 
lunch.  On  such  a  day  you  come  to  believe 
that  Keats,  on  another  occasion,  must  have 
had  his  own  Auto-Comrade  in  mind  when  he 
remarked  to  his  friend  Solitude  that 

"...  it  sure  must  be 
Almost  the  highest  bliss  of  human-kind, 
When  to  thy  haunts  two  kindred  spirits  flee." 

The  Auto-Comrade  can  sit  down  with  you 
in  thick  weather  on  a  barren  lighthouse  rock 
and  give  you  a  breathless  day  by  hanging 
upon  the  walls  of  fog  the  mellow  screeds  of 
old  philosophies,  and  causing  to  march  and 
countermarch  over  against  them  the  scarlet 
and  purple  pageants  of  history.  Hour  by 
I  82  ] 


THE    AUTO-COMRADE 

hour,  too,  he  will  linger  with  you  in  the 
metropolis,  that  breeder  of  the  densest 
solitudes  —  in  market  or  terminal,  subway, 
court-room,  library,  or  lobby  —  and  hour  by 
hour  unlock  you  those  chained  books  of  the 
soul  to  which  the  human  countenance  offers 
the  master  key. 

Something  of  a  sportsman,  too,  is  the  Auto- 
Comrade.  He  it  is  who  makes  the  fabulously 
low  score  at  golf  —  the  kind  of  score,  by  the 
way,  that  is  almost  invariably  born  to  blush 
unseen.  And  he  will  uncomplainingly,  even 
zestfully,  fish  from  dawn  to  dusk  in  a  solitude 
so  complete  that  there  is  not  even  a  fin  to 
break  it.  But  if  there  are  fish,  he  finds  them. 
He  knows  how  to  make  the  flies  float  indefi- 
nitely forward  through  yonder  narrow  open- 
ing, and  drop,  as  light  as  thistledown,  in  the 
center  of  the  temptingly  inaccessible  pool. 
He  knows  without  looking,  exactly  how  thick 
and  how  prehensile  are  the  bushes  and 
branches  that  lie  in  wait  for  the  back  cast, 
and  he  can  calculate  to  a  grain  how  much 
[  83  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

urging  the  reactionary  three-pounder  and  the 
blest  tie  that  binds  him  to  the  four-ounce  rod 
will  stand. 

He  is  one  of  the  handiest  possible  persons 
to  have  along  in  the  woods.  When  you  take 
him  on  a  canoe  trip  with  others,  and  the  party 
comes  to  "white  water,"  he  turns  out  to  be  a 
dead  shot  at  rapid-shooting.  He  is  sure  to 
know  what  to  do  at  the  supreme  moment 
when  you  jam  your  setting-pole  immutably 
between  two  rocks  and,  with  the  alternative 
of  taking  a  bath,  are  forced  to  let  go  and 
grab  your  paddle;  and  are  then  hung  up  on 
a  slightly  submerged  rock  at  the  head  of  the 
chief  rapid  just  in  time  to  see  the  rest  of  the 
party  disappear  majestically  around  the  lower 
bend.  At  such  a  time,  simply  look  to  the 
Auto-Comrade.  He  will  carry  you  through. 
Also  there  is  no  one  like  him  at  the  moment 
when,  having  felled  your  moose,  leaned  your 
rifle  against  a  tree,  and  bent  down  the  better 
to  examine  him,  the  creature  suddenly  comes 
to  life. 

[  84  ] 


THE    AUTO-COMRADE 

In  tennis,  when  you  wake  up  to  find  that 
your  racket  has  just  smashed  a  lob  on  the 
bounce  from  near  the  back-net,  scoring  a  clean 
ace  between  your  paralyzed  opponents,  you 
ought  to  know  that  the  racket  was  guided  by 
that  superior  sportsman;  and  if  you  are  truly 
modest,  you  will  admit  that  your  miraculous 
stop  wherewith  the  team  whisked  the  baseball 
championship  out  of  the  fire  in  the  fourteenth 
inning  was  due  to  his  unaided  efforts. 

There  are  other  games  about  which  he  is 
not  so  keen:  solitaire,  for  instance.  For  sol- 
itaire is  a  social  game  that  soon  loses  its  zest 
if  there  be  not  some  devoted  friend  or  relative 
sitting  by  and  simulating  that  pleasureable 
absorption  in  the  performance  which  you 
yourself  only  wish  that  you  could  feel. 

This  great  companion  can  keep  you  from 
being  lonely  even  in  a  crowd.  But  there  is 
a  certain  kind  of  crowd  that  he  cannot  abide. 
Beware  how  you  try  to  keep  him  in  a  crowd 
of  unadulterated  human  porcupines!  You 
know  how  the  philosopher  Schopenhauer  once 
[  85  ] 


THE   JOYFUL  HEART 

likened  average  humanity  to  a  herd  of  porcu- 
pines on  a  cold  day,  who  crowd  stupidly  to- 
gether for  warmth,  prick  one  another  with 
their  quills,  are  mutually  repelled,  forget  the 
incident,  grow  cold  again,  and  repeat  the 
whole  thing  ad  infinitum. 

In  other  words,  the  human  porcupine  is 
the  person  considered  at  the  beginning  of  this 
one-sided  discussion  who,  to  escape  the  terri- 
ble catastrophe  of  confronting  his  own  inner 
vacuum,  will  make  friends  with  the  most 
hideous  bore.  This  creature,  however,  is 
much  more  rare  than  the  misanthropic  Scho- 
penhauer imagined.  It  takes  a  long  time  to 
find  one  among  such  folk  as  lumbermen, 
gypsies,  shirt-waist  operatives,  fishermen, 
masons,  trappers,  sailors,  tramps,  and  team- 
sters. If  the  sour  philosopher  had  only  had 
the  pleasure  of  knowing  those  teamsters  who 
sent  him  into  paroxysms  of  rage  by  cracking 
their  whips  in  the  alley,  I  am  sure  that  he 
would  never  have  spoken  as  harshly  of  their 
minds  as  he  did.  The  fact  is  that  porcupines 
[  86  1 


THE    AUTO-COMRADE 

are  not  extremely  common  among  the  very 
"common"  people.  It  may  be  that  there  is 
something  stupefying  about  the  airs  which 
the  upper  classes,  the  best  people,  breathe  and 
put  on,  but  the  social  climber  is  apt  to  find 
the  human  porcupine  in  increasing  herds  as 
he  scales  the  heights.  This  curious  fact  would 
seem  incidentally  to  show  that  our  misan- 
thropic philosopher  must  have  moved  ex- 
clusively in  the  best  circles. 

Now,  if  there  is  one  thing  above  all  others 
that  the  Auto-Comrade  cannot  away  with,  it 
is  the  flaccid,  indolent,  stodgy  brain  of  the 
porcupine.  If  people  have  let  their  minds 
slump  down  into  porcupinishness,  or  have 
never  taken  the  trouble  to  rescue  them  from 
that  ignominious  condition  —  well,  the  Auto- 
Comrade  is  no  snob;  when  all's  said,  he  is  a 
rather  democratic  sort  of  chap.  But  he  has  to 
draw  the  line  somewhere,  you  know,  and  he 
really  must  beg  to  be  excused  from  rubbing 
shoulders  with  such  intellectual  rabble,  for 
instance,  as  blocks  upper  Fifth  Avenue  on 
I  87] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

Sunday  noons.  He  prefers  instead  the  rabble 
which,  on  all  other  noons  of  the  week,  blocks 
the  lower  end  of  that  variegated  thorough- 
fare. 

Such  exclusiveness  lays  the  Auto-Comrade 
open,  of  course,  to  the  charge  of  inhospitality. 
But  "is  not  he  hospitable,"  asks  Thoreau, 
"who  entertains  good  thoughts?"  Person- 
ally, I  think  he  is.  And  I  believe  that  this 
sort  of  hospitality  does  more  to  make  the 
world  worth  living  in  than  much  conventional 
hugging  to  your  bosom  of  porcupines  whose 
language  you  do  not  speak,  yet  with  whom  it 
is  embarrassing  to  keep  silence. 

If  the  Auto-Comrade  mislikes  the  porcu- 
pine, however,  the  feeling  is  returned  with 
exorbitant  interest.  The  alleged  failings  of 
auto-comradeship  have  always  drawn  grins, 
jokes,  fleers,  and  nudges,  from  the  auto- 
comradeless.  It  is  time  the  latter  should 
know  that  the  joke  is  really  on  him;  for  he  is 
the  most  forlorn  of  mankind.  The  other  is 
never  at  a  loss.  He  is  invulnerable,  being 
[  88  ] 


THE    AUTO-COMRADE 

one  whom  "destiny  may  not  surprise  nor 
death  dismay."  But  the  porcupine  is  liable 
at  any  moment  to  be  deserted  by  associates 
who  are  bored  by  his  sharp,  hollow  quills.  He 
finds  himself  the  victim  of  a  paradox  which 
decrees  that  the  hermit  shall  "find  his  crowds 
in  solitude"  and  never  be  alone;  but  that  the 
flocker  shall  every  now  and  then  be  cast  into 
inner  darkness,  where  shall  be  "weeping  and 
gnashing  of  teeth." 

The  laugh  is  on  the  porcupine;  but  the 
laugh  turns  almost  into  a  tear  when  one  stops 
to  realize  the  nature  of  his  plight.  Why,  the 
poor  wretch  is  actually  obliged  to  be  near 
someone  else  in  order  to  enjoy  a  sense  of 
vitality!  In  other  words,  he  needs  somebody 
else  to  do  his  living  for  him.  He  is  a  vicarious 
citizen  of  the  world,  holding  his  franchise 
only  by  courtesy  of  Tom,  Dick,  and  Harry. 
All  the  same,  it  is  rather  hard  to  pity  him 
very  profoundly  while  he  continues  to  feel 
quite  as  contemptuously  superior  as  he  usu- 
ally does.  For,  the  contempt  of  the  average 
[  89  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

porcupine  for  pals  of  the  Auto-Comrade  is 
akin  to  the  contempt  which  the  knights  of 
chivalry  felt  for  those  paltry  beings  who  were 
called  clerks  because  they  possessed  the  queer, 
unfashionable  accomplishment  of  being  able 
to  read  and  write. 

I  remember  that  the  loudest  laugh  achieved 
by  a  certain  class-day  orator  at  college  came 
when  he  related  how  the  literary  guy  and  the 
tennis-player  were  walking  one  day  in  the 
woods,  and  the  literary  guy  suddenly  ex- 
claimed: "Ah,  leave  me,  Louis!  I  would  be 
alone."  Even  apart  from  the  stilted  language 
in  which  the  orator  clothed  the  thought  of 
the  literary  guy,  there  is,  to  the  porcupine, 
something  irresistibly  comic  in  such  a  situa- 
tion. It  is  to  him  as  though  the  literary  guy 
had  stepped  up  to  the  nearest  policeman  and 
begged  for  the  room  at  Sing  Sing  already 
referred  to. 

Indeed,  the  modern  porcupine  is  as  sus- 
picious of  pals  of  the  Auto-Comrade  as  the 
porcupines  of  the  past  were  of  sorcerers  and 
[  90  ] 


THE    AUTO-COMRADE 

witches  —  folk,  by  the  way,  who  probably 
consorted  with  spirits  no  more  malign  than 
Auto-Comrades.  "What,"  asked  the  por- 
cupines of  one  another,  "can  they  be  doing, 
all  alone  there  in  those  solitary  huts?  What 
honest  man  would  live  like  that?  Ah,  they 
must  be  up  to  no  good.  They  must  be  hand 
in  glove  with  the  Evil  One.  Well,  then,  away 
with  them  to  the  stake  and  the  river!" 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  it  probably  was  not 
the  Evil  One  that  these  poor  folk  were  con- 
sorting with,  but  the  Good  One.  For  what  is  a 
man's  Auto-Comrade,  anyway,  but  his  own 
soul,  or  the  same  thing  by  what  other  name 
soever  he  likes  to  call  it,  with  which  he  divides 
the  practical,  conscious  part  of  his  brain, 
turn  and  turn  about,  share  and  share  alike? 
And  what  is  a  man's  own  soul  but  a  small 
stream  of  the  infinite,  eternal  water  of  life? 
And  what  is  heaven  but  a  vast  harbor  where 
myriad  streams  of  soul  flow  down,  returning 
at  last  to  their  Source  in  the  bliss  of  perfect 
reunion?  I  believe  that  many  a  Salem  witch 
[  91  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

was  dragged  to  her  death  from  sanctuary;  for 
church  is  not  exclusively  connected  with 
stained  glass  and  collection-baskets.  Church 
is  also  wherever  you  and  your  Auto-Comrade 
can  elude  the  starched  throng  and  fall  together, 
if  only  for  a  moment,  on  your  knees. 

The  Auto-Comrade  has  much  to  gain  by 
contrast  with  one's  flesh-and-blood  associates, 
especially  if  this  contrast  is  suddenly  brought 
home  to  one  after  a  too  long  separation  from 
him.  I  shall  never  forget  the  thrill  that  was 
mine  early  one  morning  after  two  months  of 
close,  uninterrupted  communion  with  one  of 
my  best  and  dearest  friends.  At  the  very 
instant  when  the  turn  of  the  road  cut  off  that 
friend's  departing  hand-wave,  I  was  aware  of 
a  welcoming,  almost  boisterous  shout  from 
the  hills  of  dream,  and  turning  quickly,  beheld 
my  long-lost  Auto-Comrade  rushing  eagerly 
down  the  slopes  toward  me. 

Few  joys  may  compare  with  the  joy  of 
such  a  sudden  unexpected  reunion.    It  is  like 
"the  shadow  of  a  mighty  rock  within  a  weary 
[  92  ] 


THE    AUTO-COMRADE 

land."  No,  this  simile  is  too  disloyal  to  my 
friend.  Well,  then,  it  is  like  a  beaker  full  of 
the  warm  South  when  you  are  leaving  a  good 
beer  country  and  are  trying  to  reconcile  your- 
self to  ditch-water  for  the  next  few  weeks.  At 
any  rate,  similes  or  not,  there  were  we  two 
together  again  at  last.  What  a  week  of 
weeks  we  spent,  pacing  back  and  forth  on  the 
veranda  of  our  log  cabin,  where  we  over- 
looked the  pleasant  sinuosities  of  the  Sebois 
and  gazed  out  together  over  golden  beech 
and  ghostly  birch  and  blood-red  maple  ban- 
ners to  the  far  violet  mountains  of  the  Aroos- 
took!  And  how  we  did  take  stock  of  the  im- 
mediate past,  chuckling  to  find  that  it  had 
not  been  a  quarter  so  bad  as  I  had  stupidly 
supposed.  What  gilded  forest  trails  were 
those  which  we  blazed  into  the  glamorous 
land  of  to-morrow!  And  every  other  moment 
these  recreative  labors  would  be  interrupted 
while  I  pressed  between  the  pages  of  a  note- 
book some  butterfly  or  sunset  leaf  or  quad- 
ruply  fortunate  clover  which  my  Auto-Com- 
[  93  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

rade  found  and  turned  over  to  me.  (Between 
two  of  those  pages,  by  the  way,  I  afterwards 
found  the  argument  of  this  chapter.) 

Then,  when  the  effervescence  of  our  meet- 
ing had  lost  a  little  of  its  first,  fine,  carbon- 
ated sting,  what  Elysian  hours  we  did  spend 
over  the  correspondence  of  those  other  two 
friends,  Goethe  and  Schiller!  Passage  after 
passage  we  would  turn  back  to  re-read  and 
muse  over.  These  we  would  discuss  without 
any  of  the  rancor  or  dogmatic  insistence  or 
one-eyed  stubbornness  that  usually  accom- 
pany the  clash  of  mental  steel  on  mental  steel 
from  a  different  mill.  And  without  making 
any  one  else  lose  the  thread  or  grow  short- 
breathed  or  accuse  us  passionately  of  reading 
ahead,  we  would,  on  the  slightest  provoca- 
tion, out-Fletcher  Fletcher  chewing  the  cud 
of  sweet  and  bitter  fancy.  And  we  would 
underline  and  bracket  and  side-line  and 
overline  the  ragged  little  paper  volume,  and 
scribble  up  and  down  its  margins,  and  dream 
over  its  footnotes,  to  our  hearts'  content. 
[  94  ] 


THE    AUTO-COMRADE 

Such  experiences,  though,  are  all  too  rare 
with  me.  Why?  Because  my  Auto-Comrade 
is  a  rather  particular  person  and  will  not  asso- 
ciate with  me  unless  I  toe  his  mark. 

"Come,"  I  propose  to  him,  "let  us  go  a 
journey." 

"Hold  hard,"  says  he,  and  looks  me  over 
appraisingly.  "You  know  the  rule  of  the 
Auto-Comrades'  Union.  We  are  supposed  to 
associate  with  none  but  fairly  able  persons. 
Are  you  a  fairly  able  person?" 

If  it  turns  out  that  I  am  not,  he  goes  on  a 
rampage,  and  begins  to  talk  like  an  athletic 
trainer.  The  first  thing  he  demands  is  that 
his  would-be  associate  shall  keep  on  hand  a 
jolly  good  store  of  surplus  vitality.  You  are 
expected  to  supply  exuberance  to  him  some- 
what as  you  supply  gasolene  to  your  motor. 
Now,  of  course,  there  are  in  the  world  not  a 
few  invalids  and  other  persons  of  low  physical 
vitality  whose  Auto-Comrades  happen  to 
have  sufficient  gasolene  to  keep  them  both 
running,  if  only  on  short  rations.  Most  of 
[  95  ] 


THE   JOYFUL   HEART 

these  cases,  however,  are  pathological.  They 
have  hot-boxes  at  both  ends  of  the  machine, 
and  their  progress  is  destined  all  too  soon  to 
cease  and  determine  disastrously.  The  rest 
of  these  cases  are  the  rare  exceptions  which 
prove  the  rule.  For  unexuberant  yet  un- 
pathological  pals  of  the  Auto-Comrade  are 
as  rare  as  harmonious  households  in  which 
the  efforts  of  a  devoted  and  blissful  wife  sup- 
port an  able-bodied  husband. 

The  rule  is  that  you  have  got  to  earn  exu- 
berance for  two.  "Learn  to  eat  balanced 
rations  right,"  thunders  the  Auto-Comrade, 
laying  down  the  law;  "exercise,  perspire, 
breathe,  bathe,  sleep  out  of  doors,  and  sleep 
enough;  rule  your  liver  with  a  rod  of  iron, 
don't  take  drugs  or  nervines,  cure  sickness 
beforehand,  keep  love  in  your  heart,  do  an 
adult's  work  in  the  world,  have  at  least  as 
much  fun  as  you  ought  to  have." 

"That,"  he  goes  on,  "is  the  way  to  develop 
enough  physical  overplus  so  that  you  will  be 
enabled  to  overcome  your  present  sad  addic- 
l  96  ] 


THE    AUTO-COMRADE 

tion  to  mob-intoxication.  And,  provided  your 
mind  is  not  in  as  bad  condition  as  your  body, 
this  physical  overplus  will  transmute  some 
of  itself  into  mental  exuberance.  This  will 
enable  you  to  have  more  fun  with  your  mind 
than  an  enthusiastic  kitten  has  with  its  tail. 
It  will  enable  you  to  look  before  and  after, 
and  purr  over  what  is,  as  well  as  to  discern, 
with  pleasurable  longing,  what  is  not,  and 
set  forth  confidently  to  capture  it." 

But  if,  by  any  chance,  you  have  allowed 
your  mind  to  get  into  the  sort  of  condition 
which  the  old-fashioned  German  scholar  used 
to  allow  his  body  to  get  into,  it  develops  that 
the  Auto-Comrade  hates  a  flabby  brain  almost 
as  much  as  he  hates  a  flabby  body.  He  soon 
makes  it  clear  that  he  will  not  have  much  to 
do  with  any  one  who  has  not  yet  mastered 
the  vigorous  and  highly  complex  art  of  not 
worrying.  Also,  he  demands  of  his  compan- 
ion the  knack  of  calm,  consecutive  thought. 
This  is  one  reason  why  so  many  more  Auto- 
Comrades  are  to  be  found  in  crow's-nests, 
[  97] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

gypsy-vans,  and  shirt-waist  factories  than  on 
upper  Fifth  Avenue.  For,  watching  the  stars 
and  the  sea  from  a  swaying  masthead,  taking 
light-heartedly  to  the  open  road,  or  even 
operating  a  rather  unwholesome  sewing-ma- 
chine all  day  in  silence,  is  better  for  consecu- 
tiveness  of  mind  than  a  never-ending  round  of 
offices,  clubs,  committees,  servants,  dinners, 
teas,  and  receptions,  to  each  of  which  one  is 
a  little  late. 

In  diffusing  knowledge  of,  and  enthusiasm 
for,  this  knack  of  concentration,  Arnold 
Bennett's  little  books  on  mental  efficiency 
have  done  wonders  for  the  art  of  auto-com- 
radeship. Their  popular  persuasiveness  has 
coaxed  thousands  on  thousands  of  us  to  go 
in  for  a  few  minutes'  worth  of  mental  calis- 
thenics every  day.  They  have  actually 
cajoled  us  into  the  painful  feat  of  glancing 
over  a  page  of  a  book  and  then  putting  it 
down  and  trying  to  retrace  the  argument  in 
memory.  Or  they  have  coaxed  us  to  fix  on 
some  subject  —  any  subject  —  for  reflection, 
[  98  ] 


THE    AUTO-COMRADE 

and  then  scourge  our  straying  minds  back  to 
it  at  every  few  steps  of  the  walk  to  the  morn- 
ing train.  And  we  have  found  that  the  men- 
tal muscles  have  responded  at  once  to  this 
treatment.  They  have  hardened  under  the 
exercise  until  being  left  alone  has  begun  to 
change  from  confinement  in  the  same  cell 
with  that  worst  of  enemies  who  has  the 
right  to  forge  one's  own  name — into  a  joyful 
pleasure  jaunt  with  a  totally  different  person 
who,  if  not  one's  best  friend,  is  at  least  to  be 
counted  on  as  a  trusty,  entertaining,  resource- 
ful, unselfish  associate  —  at  times,  perhaps, 
a  little  exacting  —  yet  certainly  a  far  more 
brilliant  and  generally  satisfactory  person 
than  his  companion. 

No  matter  what  the  ignorant  or  the  envious 
may  say,  there  is  nothing  really  unsocial  in 
a  moderate  indulgence  in  the  art  of  auto- 
comradeship.  A  few  weeks  of  it  bring  you 
back  with  a  fresher,  keener  appreciation  of 
your  other  friends  and  of  humanity  in  general 
than  you  had  before  setting  forth.  In  the 
[991 


•     THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

continuous  performance  of  the  psalm  of  life 
such  contrasts  as  this  of  solos  and  choruses 
have  a  reciprocal  advantage. 

But  auto-comradeship  must  not  be  over- 
done, as  it  was  overdone  by  the  mediaeval 
monks.  Its  delights  are  too  delicious,  its 
particular  vintage  of  the  wine  of  experience 
too  rich,  for  long-continued  consumption. 
Consecutive  thought,  though  it  is  one  of  man's 
greatest  pleasures,  is  at  the  same  time  perhaps 
the  most  arduous  labor  that  he  can  perform. 
And  after  a  long  period  of  it,  both  the  Auto- 
Comrade  and  his  companion  become  exhausted 
and,  perforce,  less  comradely. 

Besides  the  incidental  exhaustion,  there  is 
another  reason  why  this  beatific  association 
must  have  its  time-limit;  for,  unfortunately, 
one's  Auto-Comrade  is  always  of  the  same 
sex  as  one's  self,  and  in  youth,  at  least,  if  the 
presence  of  the  complementary  part  of  crea- 
tion is  long  denied,  there  comes  a  time  when 
this  denial  surges  higher  and  higher  in  sub- 
consciousness,  then  breaks  into  consciousness, 
[  100  ] 


THE   AUTO-COMRADE 

and  keeps  on  surging  until  it  deluges  all  the 
tranquillities,  zests,  surprises,  and  excite- 
ments of  auto-comradeship,  and  makes  them 
of  no  effect. 

This  is,  probably,  a  wise  provision  for  the 
salvation  of  the  human  digestion.  For  other- 
wise, many  a  man,  having  tasted  of  the  fruit 
of  the  tree  of  the  knowledge  of  auto-comrade- 
ship, might  thereupon  be  tempted  to  retire 
to  his  hermit's  den  hard  by  and  endeavor  to 
sustain  himself  for  life  on  this  food  alone. 

Most  of  us,  however,  long  before  such  ex- 
tremes have  been  reached,  are  sure  to  rush 
back  to  our  kind  for  the  simple  reason  that 
we  are  enjoying  auto-comradeship  so  much 
that  we  want  someone  else  to  enjoy  it  with. 


VI 

VIM  AND   VISION 

EFFICIENCY  is  to-day  the  Hallelujah 
Chorus  of  industry.  I  know  a  manufac- 
turer who  recently  read  a  book  on  business 
management.  Stop-watch  in  hand  he  then 
made  an  exhaustive  study  of  his  office  force 
and  their  every  action.  After  considering  the 
tabulated  results  he  arose,  smashed  all  but 
one  of  the  many  office  mirrors,  bought  modern 
typewriters,  and  otherwise  eliminated  works 
of  supererogation.  The  sequel  is  that  a  dozen 
stenographers  to-day  perform  the  work  of 
the  former  thirty-two. 

This  sort  of  thing  is  spreading  through  the 
business  world  and  beyond  it  in  every  direc- 
tion. Even  the  artists  are  studying  the  bear- 
ing of  industrial  efficiency  on  the  arts  of  sculp- 
ture, music,  literature,  architecture,  and  paint- 
ing. But  beyond  the  card  catalogue  and  the 
[  102  ] 


VIM    AND    VISION 

filing  cabinet  the  artists  find  that  this  new 
gospel  has  little  to  offer  them.  Their  sym- 
pathies go  out,  instead,  to  a  different  kind  of 
efficiency.  The  kind  that  bids  fair  to  shatter 
their  old  lives  to  bits  and  re-mold  them 
nearer  to  the  heart's  desire  is  not  indus- 
trial but  human.  For  inspiration  it  goes 
back  of  the  age  of  Brandeis  to  the  age  of 
Pericles. 

The  enthusiasm  for  human  efficiency  is 
beginning  to  rival  that  for  industrial  effi- 
ciency. Preventive  medicine,  public  play- 
grounds, the  new  health  education,  school 
hygiene,  city  planning,  eugenics,  housing 
reform,  the  child-welfare  and  country-life 
movements,  the  cult  of  exercise  and  sport  — 
these  all  are  helping  to  lower  the  death-rate 
and  enrich  the  life-rate  the  world  over.  Health 
has  fought  with  smoke  and  germs  and  is  now 
in  the  air.  It  would  be  strange  if  the  recep- 
tive nature  of  the  artist  should  escape  the 
benignant  infection. 

There  is  an  excellent  reason  why  human 
[  103  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

efficiency  should  appeal  less  to  the  industrial 
than  to  the  artistic  worlds.  Industry  has 
a  new  supply  of  human  machines  always 
available.  Their  initial  cost  is  nothing.  So 
it  pays  to  overwork  them,  scrap  them  promptly, 
and  install  fresh  ones.  Thus  it  comes  that  the 
costly  spinning  machines  in  the  Southern 
mills  are  exquisitely  cared  for,  while  the  cheap 
little  boys  and  girls  who  tie  the  broken 
threads  are  made  to  last  an  average  four  or 
five  years.  In  art  it  is  different.  The  artist 
knows  that  he  is,  like  Swinburne's  Hertha, 
at  once  the  machine  and  the  machinist.  It 
is  dawning  upon  him  that  one  chief  reason 
why  the  old  Greeks  scaled  Parnassus  so 
efficiently  is  that  all  the  master-climbers  got, 
and  kept,  their  human  machines  in  good  order 
for  the  climb.  They  trained  for  the  event  as 
an  Olympic  athlete  trains  to-day  for  the 
Marathon.  One  other  reason  why  there  was 
so  much  record-breaking  in  ancient  Greece  is 
that  the  non-artists  trained  also,  and  thus, 
through  their  heightened  sympathy  and  appre- 
[  104  ] 


VIM    AND    VISION 

ciation  of  the  master-climbers,  became  mas- 
ters by  proxy.    But  that  is  another  chapter. 

Why  has  art  never  again  reached  the  Peri- 
clean  plane?  Chiefly  because  the  artist 
broke  training  when  Greece  declined,  and  has 
never  since  then  brought  his  body  up  to  the 
former  level  of  efficiency. 

Now,  as  the  physiological  psychologists 
assure  us,  the  artist  needs  a  generous  overplus 
of  physical  vitality.  The  art-impulse  is  a 
brimming-over  of  the  cups  of  mental  and 
spiritual  exuberance.  And  the  best  way  to 
insure  this  mental  and  spiritual  overplus  is  to 
gain  the  physical.  The  artist's  first  duty  is 
to  make  his  body  as  vim-full  as  possible.  He 
will  soon  find  that  he  is  greater  than  he  knows. 
He  will  discover  that  he  has,  until  then,  been 
walking  the  earth  more  than  half  a  corpse. 
With  joy  he  will  come  to  see  that  living  in 
a  glow  of  health  bears  the  same  relation  to 
merely  not  being  sick  that  a  plunge  in  the 
cold  salt  surf  bears  to  using  a  tepid  wash-rag 
in  a  hall  bedroom. 

~ 105 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

"All  through  the  life  of  a  feeble-bodied 
man,  his  path  is  lined  with  memory's  grave- 
stones which  mark  the  spots  where  noble 
enterprises  perished  for  lack  of  physical  vigor 
to  embody  them  in  deeds."  Thus  wrote  the 
educator,  Horace  Mann.  And  his  words 
apply  with  special  force  to  the  worker  in 
the  arts.  One  should  bear  in  mind  that  the 
latter  is  in  a  peculiar  dilemma.  His  nerve- 
racking,  confining,  exhausting  work  always 
tends  to  enfeeble  and  derange  his  body.  But 
the  claims  of  the  work  are  so  exacting  that 
it  is  no  use  for  him  to  spare  intensity.  Unless 
he  is  doing  his  utmost  he  had  better  be  doing 
nothing  at  all.  And  to  do  his  utmost  he  must 
keep  his  body  in  that  supremely  fit  condition 
which  the  work  itself  is  always  tending  to 
destroy.  The  one  lasting  solution  is  for  him 
to  reduce  his  working  time  to  a  safe  maximum 
and  increase  his  recreation  and  sleeping-time 
to  a  safe  minimum,  and  to  train  "without 
haste,  without  rest." 

|      "The  first  requisite  to  great  intellectuality 
[  106  1 


VIM    AND    VISION 

in  a  man  is  to  be  a  good  animal,"  says  Maxim 
the  inventor.  Hamerton,  in  his  best-known 
book,  offers  convincing  proof  that  overflowing 
health  is  one  of  the  first  essentials  of  genius; 
and  shows  how  triumphant  a  part  it  played 
in  the  careers  of  such  mighty  men  of  intel- 
lectual valor  as  Leonardo  da  Vinci,  Kant, 
Wordsworth,  and  Sir  Walter  Scott. 

Is  the  reader  still  unconvinced  that  physical 
exuberance  is  necessary  to  the  artist?  Then 
let  him  read  biography  and  note  the  para- 
lyzing effect  upon  the  biographees,  of  sickness 
and  half  sickness  and  three  quarter  wellness. 
He  will  see  that,  as  a  rule,  the  masters  have 
done  their  most  telling  and  lasting  work  with 
the  tides  of  physical  vim  at  flood.  For  the 
genius  is  no  Joshua.  He  cannot  make  the 
sun  of  the  mind  and  the  moon  of  the  spirit 
stand  still  while  the  tides  of  health  are  ebbing 
seaward.  Indeed  biography  should  not  be 
necessary  to  convince  the  fair-minded  reader. 
Autobiography  should  answer.  Just  let 
Tiim  glance  back  over  his  own  experience  and 
[  107  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

say  whether  he  has  not  thought  his  deepest 
thoughts  and  performed  his  most  brilliant 
deeds  under  the  intoxication  of  a  stimulant 
no  less  heady  than  that  of  exuberant  health. 
There  is,  of  course,  the  vexed  question  of 
the  sickly  genius.  My  personal  belief  is  firm 
that,  as  a  rule,  he  has  won  his  triumphs  de- 
spite bad  health,  and  not  —  as  some  like  to 
imagine  —  because  of  bad  health.  To  this 
rule  there  are  a  few  often  cited  exceptions. 
Now,  no  one  can  deny  that  there  is  a  patho- 
logical brilliance  of  good  cheer  in  the  works 
of  Stevenson  and  other  tubercular  artists. 
The  white  plague  is  a  powerful  mental  stimu- 
lant. It  is  a  double-distilled  extract  of  base- 
less optimism.  But  this  optimism,  like  that 
resulting  from  other  stimulants,  is  dearly 
bought.  Its  shrift  is  too  short.  And  let 
nobody  forget  that  for  each  variety  of  patho- 
logical optimism  and  brilliance  and  beauty 
there  are  ninety  and  nine  corresponding  sorts 
of  pathological  pessimism  and  dullness  and 
ugliness  induced  by  disorders  of  the  liver, 
[  108  1 


VIM    AND    VISION 

heart,  stomach,  brain,  skin,  and  so  on  with- 
out end. 

The  thing  for  artists  to  do  is  to  find  out 
what  physical  conditions  make  for  the  best 
art  in  the  long  run,  and  then  secure  these 
conditions  in  as  short  a  run  as  possible.  If 
tuberculosis  makes  for  it,  then  by  all  means 
let  those  of  us  who  are  sincerely  devoted  to 
art  be  inoculated  without  delay.  If  the 
family  doctor  refuses  to  oblige,  all  we  have  to 
do  is  to  avoid  fresh  air,  kiss  indiscriminately, 
practice  a  systematic  neglect  of  colds,  and 
frequent  the  subway  during  rush  hours.  If 
alcohol  makes  for  the  best  art,  let  us  forthwith 
be  admitted  to  the  bar  —  the  stern  judgment 
bar  where  each  solitary  drinker  is  arraigned. 
For  it  is  universally  admitted  that  in  art, 
quality  is  more  important  than  quantity.  "If 
that  powerful  corrosive,  alcohol,  only  makes 
us  do  a  little  first-class  work,  what  matter  if 
it  corrode  us  to  death  immediately  after- 
wards? We  shall  have  had  our  day."  Thus 
many  a  gallant  soul  argues.  But  is  there  not 
[  109  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

another  ideal  which  is  as  far  above  mere 
quality  as  quality  is  above  mere  quantity? 
I  think  there  is.  It  is  quantity  of  quality. 
And  quantity  of  quality  is  exactly  the  thing 
that  cannot  brook  the  corrosiveness  of  power- 
ful stimulants. 

I  am  not  satisfied,  however,  that  stimulants 
make  entirely  for  the  fine  quality  of  even  the 
short  shrift.  To  my  ear,  tubercular  optimism, 
when  thumped  on  the  chest,  sounds  a  bit 
hollow.  It  does  not  ring  quite  as  true  as 
healthy  optimism  because  one  feels  in  the 
long  run  its  automatic,  pathological  character. 
Thus  tubercular,  alcoholized,  and  drugged 
art  may  often  be  recognized  by  its  somewhat 
artificial,  unhuman,  abnormal  quality.  I 
believe  that  if  the  geniuses  who  have  done 
their  work  under  the  influence  of  these  stimu- 
lants had,  instead,  trained  sound  bodies  as  for 
an  Olympic  victory,  the  arts  would  to-day  be 
the  richer  in  quantity  of  quality.  On  this 
point  George  Meredith  wrote  a  trenchant 
word  in  a  letter  to  W.  G.  Collins: 
[  HO] 


VIM    AND    VISION 

I  think  that  the  notion  of  drinking  any  kind  of 
alcohol  as  a  stimulant  for  intellectual  work  can 
have  entered  the  minds  of  those  only  who  snatch 
at  the  former  that  they  may  conceive  a  fictitious 
execution  of  the  latter.  Stimulants  may  refresh, 
and  may  even  temporarily  comfort,  the  body  after 
labor  of  brain;  they  do  not  help  it  —  not  even  in 
the  lighter  kinds  of  labor.  They  unseat  the  judg- 
ment, pervert  vision.  Productions,  cast  off  by 
the  aid  of  the  use  of  them,  are  but  flashy,  trashy 
stuff  —  or  exhibitions  of  the  prodigious  in  wildness 
or  grotesque  conceit,  of  the  kind  which  Hoffman's 
tales  give,  for  example;  he  was  one  of  the  few  at 
all  eminent,  who  wrote  after  drinking. 

To  reinforce  the  opinion  of  the  great  Eng- 
lishman I  cannot  forbear  giving  that  of  an 
equally  great  American: 

Never  [wrote  Emerson]  can  any  advantage  be 
taken  of  nature  by  a  trick.  The  spirit  of  the 
world,  the  great  calm  presence  of  the  Creator,  comes 
not  forth  to  the  sorceries  of  opium  or  of  wine. 
The  sublime  vision  comes  to  the  pure  and  simple 
soul  in  a  clean  and  chaste  body.  .  .  .  The  poet's 
habit  of  living  should  be  set  on  so  low  a  key  that 
the  common  influences  should  delight  him.  His 
cheerfulness  should  be  the  gift  of  the  sunlight; 
the  air  should  suffice  for  his  inspiration,  and  he 
should  be  tipsy  with  water. 

[  HI  1 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

In  other  words,  the  artist  should  keep  him- 
?  self  in  a  condition  so  fit  as  to  need  no  other 
}  stimulant  than  his  own  exuberance.  But  this 
should  always  flow  as  freely  as  beer  at  a  col- 
lege reunion.  And  there  should  always  be 
plenty  in  reserve.  It  were  well  to  consider 
whether  there  is  not  some  connection  between 
decadent  art  and  decadent  bodies.  A  friend 
of  mine  recently  attended  a  meeting  of  deca- 
dent painters  and  reported  that  he  could  not 
find  a  chin  or  a  forehead  in  the  room. 

One  reason  why  so  many  of  the  world's 
great  since  Greece  have  neglected  to  store 
up  an  overplus  of  vitality  is  that  exercise  is 
well-nigh  indispensable  thereto;  and  exercise 
has  not  seemed  to  them  sufficiently  dignified. 
We  are  indebted  to  the  dark  ages  for  this  dull 
superstition.  It  was  then  that  the  monas- 
teries built  gloomy  granite  greenhouses  for 
the  flower  of  the  world's  intellect,  that  it 
might  deteriorate  in  the  darkness  and  perish 
without  reproducing  its  kind.  The  monastic 
system  held  the  body  a  vile  thing,  and  believed 


VIM    AND    VISION 

that  to  develop  and  train  it  was  beneath  the 
dignity  of  the  spiritually  elect.  So  flagella- 
tion was  substituted  for  perspiration,  much 
as,  in  the  Orient,  scent  is  substituted  for  soap 
—  and  with  no  more  satisfactory  result.  This 
false  notion  of  dignity  has  since  then,  by  keep- 
ing men  out  of  flannels,  gymnasium  suits, 
running-tights,  and  overalls,  performed  prodi- 
gies in  the  work  of  blighting  the  flowers  of 
the  mind  and  stunting  the  fruit  trees  of  the 
spirit. 

To-day,  however,  we  are  escaping  from 
the  old  superstition.  We  begin  to  see  that 
there  is  no  complete  dignity  for  man  without 
a  dignified  physique;  and  that  there  is  no 
physical  dignity  to  compare  with  that  of  the 
hard-trained  athlete.  True,  he  who  trains 
can  hardly  keep  up  the  old-time  pose  of  the 
grand  old  man  or  the  grand  young  man.  He 
must  perforce  be  more  human  and  natural. 
But  this  sort  of  grandeur  is  now  going  out  of 
fashion.  And  its  absence  must  show  to  ad- 
vantage in  his  work. 

I  US  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

As  a  rule  the  true  artist  is  a  most  devoted 
and  self -sacrificing  person.  Ever  since  the 
piping  times  of  Pericles  he  has  usually  been 
willing  to  sacrifice  to  the  demands  of  his  art 
most  of  the  things  he  enjoys  excepting  poor 
health.  Wife,  children,  friends,  credit  —  all 
may  go  by  the  board.  But  his  poor  health 
he  addresses  with  solemn,  scriptural  loyalty: 
"Whither  thou  goest  I  will  go:  and  where 
thou  lodgest  I  will  lodge.  Where  thou  diest, 
will  I  die,  and  there  will  I  be  buried.'*  Not 
that  he  enjoys  the  misery  incidental  to  poor 
health.  But  he  most  thoroughly  enjoys  a 
number  of  its  causes.  Sitting  up  too  late  at 
night  is  what  he  enjoys;  smoking  too  much, 
drinking  too  much,  yielding  to  the  exhausting 
sway  of  the  divine  efflatus  for  longer  hours 
at  a  time  than  he  has  any  business  to,  bolting 
unbalanced  meals,  and  so  on. 

But  the  artist  is  finding  out  that  poor  health 
is  the  very  first  enjoyment  which  he  ought  to 
sacrifice;  that  the  sacrifice  is  by  no  means  as 
heroic  as  it  appears;  and  that,  once  it  is  ac- 


VIM    AND    VISION 

complished,  the  odds  are  that  all  the  other 
things  he  thought  he  must  offer  up  may  be 
added  unto  him  through  his  own  increased 
efficiency. 

No  doubt,  all  this  business  of  regimen,  of 
constant  alertness  and  petty  self-sacrifice,  is 
bound  to  grow  irksome  before  it  settles  down 
in  life  and  becomes  habitual.  But  what  does 
a  little  irksomeness  count  —  or  even  a  great 
deal  of  irksomeness  —  as  against  the  long, 
deep  thrill  of  doing  better  than  you  thought 
you  ever  knew  how  —  of  going  from  strength 
to  strength  and  creating  that  which  will  ele- 
vate and  delight  mankind  long  after  the  pangs 
of  installing  regimen  are  forgotten  and  you 
have  once  and  for  all  broken  training  and  laid 
you  down  to  sleep  over? 

The  reason  why  great  men  and  women  are 
so  often  cynical  about  their  own  success  is 
this:  they  have  been  so  immoderate  in  their 
enjoyment  of  poor  health  that  when  the  hour 
of  victory  comes,  they  lack  the  exuberance 
and  self-restraint  essential  to  the  savoring  of 
I  115] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

achievement  or  of  any  other  pleasure.  I 
believe  that  the  successful  invalid  is  more  apt 
to  be  cynical  about  his  success  than  the 
healthy  failure  about  his  failure.  The  latter 
is  usually  an  optimist.  But  this  is  a  hard 
belief  to  substantiate.  For  the  perfectly 
healthy  failure  does  not  grow  on  every  bush. 

If  only  the  physical  conscientiousness  of 
the  Greeks  had  never  been  allowed  to  die  out, 
the  world  to-day  would  be  manifoldly  a  richer, 
fairer,  and  more  inspiring  place.  As  it  is, 
we  shall  never  be  able  to  reckon  up  our  losses 
in  genius:  in  Shakespeares  whose  births  were 
frustrated  by  the  preventable  illness  or  death 
of  their  possible  parents;  in  Schuberts  who 
sickened  or  died  from  preventable  causes 
before  they  had  delivered  a  note  of  their 
message;  in  Giorgiones  whom  a  suicidally 
ignorant  conduct  of  physical  life  condemned 
to  have  their  work  cheapened  and  curtailed. 
What  overwhelming  losses  has  art  not  sus- 
tained by  having  the  ranks  of  its  artists  and 
their  most  creative  audiences  decimated  by 
[  116] 


VIM    AND    VISION 

the  dullness  of  mediocre  health!  It  is  hard 
to  endure  the  thought  of  what  the  geniuses 
of  the  modern  world  might  have  been  able  to 
accomplish  if  only  they  had  lived  and  trained 
like  athletes  and  been  treated  with  a  small 
part  of  the  practical  consideration  and  live 
sympathy  which  humanity  bestows  on  a 
favorite  ball-player  or  prize-fighter. 

To-day  there  is  still  a  vast  amount  of  super- 
stition arrayed  against  the  truth  that  full- 
ness of  life  and  not  grievous  necessity  is  the 
mother  of  artistic  invention.  Necessity  is, 
of  course,  only  the  stepmother  of  invention. 
But  men  like  to  convince  themselves  that  sick- 
ness and  morbidity  are  good  for  the  arts, 
just  as  they  delightedly  embrace  the  convic- 
tion, and  hold  it  with  a  death-grip,  that  a  life 
of  harassing  poverty  and  anxious  preoccupa- 
tion is  indispensable  to  the  true  poet.  The 
circumstance  that  this  belief  runs  clean 
counter  to  the  showing  of  history  does  not 
embarrass  them.  Convinced  against  their  will, 
most  people  are  of  the  same  opinion  still. 
[  1173 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

And  they  enthusiastically  assault  and  batter 
any  one  who  points  out  the  truth,  as  I  shall 
endeavor  to  do  in  chapter  eight. 

Even  if  the  ideal  of  physical  efficiency  had 
been  revived  as  little  as  a  century  ago,  how 
much  our  world  would  be  the  gainer!  If 
Richard  Wagner  had  only  known  how  and 
what  to  eat  and  how  to  avoid  catching  cold 
every  other  month,  we  would  not  have  so 
many  dull,  dreary  places  to  overlook  hi  "The 
Ring,"  and  would,  instead,  have  three  or 
four  more  immortal  tone-dramas  than  his 
colds  and  indigestions  gave  him  time  to  write. 
One  hates  to  think  what  Poe  might  have  done 
in  literature  if  he  had  taken  a  cure  and  become 
a  chip  of  the  old  oaken  bucket.  Tuberculosis, 
they  now  say,  is  preventable.  If  only  they 
had  said  so  before  the  death  of  Keats!  .  .  . 

It  makes  one  lose  patience  to  think  how 
Schiller  shut  himself  up  in  a  stuffy  closet  of  a 
room  all  day  with  his  exhausting  work;  and 
how  the  sole  recreation  he  allowed  himself 
during  the  week  was  a  solemn  game  of 
[  H8  ] 


VIM    AND    VISION 

Vhombre  with  the  philosopher  Schelling.  And 
then  he  wondered  why  he  could  not  get  on 
with  his  writing  and  why  he  was  forever  catch- 
ing cold  (einen  starken  Schnupferi);  and  why 
his  head  was  so  thick  half  the  time  that  he 
couldn't  do  a  thing  with  it.  In  his  corre- 
spondence with  Goethe  it  is  exasperating  to 
observe  that  these  great  poets  kept  so  little 
reserve  vim  in  stock  that  a  slight  change 
of  temperature  or  humidity,  or  even  a  dark 
day,  was  enough  to  overdraw  their  health 
account  and  bankrupt  their  work.  How 
glorious  it  would  have  been  if  they  had  only 
stored  up  enough  exuberance  to  have  made 
them  health  magnates,  impervious  to  the 
slings  and  arrows  of  outrageous  February, 
and  able  to  snap  their  fingers  and  flourish 
inspired  quills  in  the  face  of  a  vile  March! 
In  that  case  their  published  works  might  not, 
perhaps,  have  gained  much  in  bulk,  but  the 
masterpieces  would  now  surely  represent  a 
far  larger  proportion  of  their  Sammtliche 
Werke  than  they  do.  And  the  second  part  of 
[119  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

"Faust"  would  not,  I  think,  contain  that 
lament  about  the  flesh  so  seldom  having  wings 
to  match  those  of  the  spirit. 

"Ach!  zu  des  Geistes  Flilgeln  wird  so  leicht 
Kein  korperlicher  FlUgel  sich  gesellen." 

Some  of  the  most  opulent  and  powerful 
spirits  ever  seen  on  earth  have  scarcely  done 
more  than  indicate  what  kind  of  birthrights 
they  bartered  away  for  a  mess  of  pottage. 
Coleridge,  for  example,  ceased  to  write  poetry 
after  thirty  because,  by  dissipating  his  over- 
plus of  life,  he  had  too  grievously  wronged 
what  he  described  as 

"This  body  that  does  me  grievous  wrong." 

After  all,  there  are  comparatively  few  mas- 
ters, since  the  glory  that  was  Greece,  who 
have  not  half  buried  their  talents  in  the  earthy 
darkness  of  mediocre  health.  When  we  survey 
the  army  of  modern  genius,  how  little  of  the 
sustained  ring  and  resilience  and  triumphant 
immortal  youth  of  real  exuberance  do  we  find 
there!  Instead  of  a  band  of  sound,  alert, 
[  120  ] 


VIM    AND    VISION 

well-equipped  soldiers  of  the  mind  and  spirit, 
behold  a  sorry-looking  lot  of  stragglers  pain- 
fully limping  along  with  lack-luster  eyes,  or 
eyes  bright  with  the  luster  of  fever.  And  the 
people  whom  they  serve  are  not  entirely  free 
from  blame.  They  have  neglected  to  fill  the 
soldiers'  knapsacks,  or  put  shirts  on  their 
backs.  As  for  footgear,  it  is  the  usual  cam- 
paign army  shoe,  made  of  blotting  paper  — 
the  shoe  that  left  red  marks  behind  it  at  Valley 
Forge  and  Gettysburg  and  San  Juan  Hill. 
I  believe  that  a  better  time  is  coming  and  that 
the  real  renaissance  of  creative  art  is  about 
to  dawn.  For  we  and  our  army  of  artists  are 
now  beginning  to  see  that  if  the  artist  is  com- 
pletely to  fulfill  his  function  he  must  be  able 
to  run  —  not  alone  with  patience,  but  also 
with  the  brilliance  born  of  abounding  vitality 
—  the  race  that  is  set  before  him.  This  dawn- 
ing belief  is  the  greatest  hope  of  modern  art. 

It  does  one  good  to  see  how  artists,  here, 
there,  and  everywhere,  are  beginning  to  grow 
enthusiastic  over  the  new-old  gospel  of  bodily 
[  121  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

efficiency,  and  physically  to  "revive  the  just 
designs  of  Greece."  The  encouraging  thing 
is  that  the  true  artist  who  once  finds  what  an 
impulse  is  given  his  work  by  rigorous  training, 
is  never  content  to  slump  back  to  his  former 
vegetative,  death-in-life  existence.  His  daily 
prayer  has  been  said  in  a  single  line  by  a 
recent  American  poet: 

"Life,  grant  that  we  may  live  until  we  die." 

In  every  way  the  artist  finds  himself  the 
gainer  by  cutting  down  his  hours  of  work  to 
the  point  where  he  never  loses  his  reserve  of 
energy.  He  now  is  beginning  to  take  absolute 
—  not  merely  relative  —  vacations,  and  more 
of  them.  For  he  remembers  that  no  man's 
work  —  not  even  Rembrandt's  or  Beethoven's 
or  Shakespeare's  —  is  ever  too  good;  and  that 
every  hour  of  needed  rest  or  recreation  makes 
the  ensuing  work  better.  It  is  being  borne  in 
on  the  artist  that  a  health-book  like  Fisher's 
"Making  Life  Worth  While"  is  of  as  much 
professional  value  to  him  as  many  a  treatise 


VIM    AND    VISION 

on  the  practice  of  his  craft.  Insight  into  the 
physiological  basis  of  his  life-work  can  save 
the  artist,  it  seems,  from  those  periods  of 
black  despair  which  he  once  used  to  employ 
in  running  his  head  against  a  concrete  wall, 
and  raging  impotently  because  he  could  not 
butt  through.  Now,  instead  of  laying  his 
futility  to  a  mysteriously  malignant  fate,  or  to 
the  persecution  of  secret  enemies,  he  is  likely 
to  throw  over  stimulants  and  late  hours  and 
take  to  the  open  road,  the  closed  squash-court, 
and  the  sleeping-porch.  And  presently  armies 
cannot  withhold  him  from  joyful,  triumphant 
labor. 

The  artist  is  finding  that  exuberance,  this 
Open  Sesame  to  the  things  that  count,  may 
not  be  won  without  the  friendly  collaboration 
of  the  pores;  and  that  two  birds  of  paradise 
may  be  killed  with  one  stone  (which  is  pre- 
cious above  rubies)  by  giving  the  mind  fun 
while  one  gives  the  pores  occupation.  Sport 
is  this  precious  stone.  There  is,  of  course, 
something  to  be  said  for  sportless  exercise. 
[  123  1 


THE   JOYFUL   HEART 

It  is  fairly  good  for  the  artist  to  perform  solemn 
antics  in  a  gymnasium  class,  to  gesture  im- 
passionedly  with  dumb-bells,  and  tread  the 
mill  of  the  circular  running-track.  But  it  is 
far  better  for  him  to  go  in  with  equal  energy 
for  exercise  which,  while  developing  the  body, 
re-creates  the  mind  and  spirit.  That  kind  of 
exercise  is  best,  in  my  opinion,  which  offers 
plenty  of  variety  and  humor  and  the  excite- 
ment of  competition.  I  mean  games  like 
tennis,  baseball,  handball,  golf,  lacrosse,  and 
polo,  and  sports  like  swift-water  canoeing 
and  fly-fishing,  boxing,  and  fencing.  These 
take  the  mind  of  the  artist  quite  away  from 
its  preoccupations  and  then  restore  it  to  them, 
unless  he  has  taken  too  much  of  a  good  thing, 
with  a  fresh  viewpoint  and  a  zest  for  work. 

Sport  is  one  of  the  chief  makers  of  exuber- 
ance because  of  its  purging,  exhilarating,  and 
constructive  effects  on  body,  mind,  and  spirit. 
So  many  contemporary  artists  are  being  con- 
verted to  sport  that  the  artistic  type  seems  to 
be  changing  under  our  eyes.  It  was  only  yes- 
[  124  ] 


VIM    AND    VISION 

terday  that  the  worker  in  literature,  sculpture, 
painting,  or  music  was  a  sickly,  morbid, 
anaemic,  peculiar  specimen,  distrusted  at  sight 
by  the  average  man,  and  a  shining  mark  for 
all  the  cast-off  wit  of  the  world.  Gilbert 
never  tired  of  describing  him  in  "Patience." 
He  was  a  "foot-in-the-grave  young  man,"  or 
a  "  Je-ne-sais-quoi  young  man."  He  was 

"A  most  intense  young  man, 
A  soulful-eyed  young  man. 

An  ultra-poetical,  superaesthetical,  Out-of-the-way 
young  man." 

To-day,  what  a  change!  Where  is  this 
young  man?  Most  of  his  ilk  have  accom- 
panied the  snows  of  yester-year.  And  a  goodly 
proportion  of  those  who  make  merry  in  their 
room  are  sure-eyed,  well  set-up,  ruddy,  mus- 
cular chaps,  about  whom  the  average  man  may 
jeer  and  quote  slanderous  doggerel  only  at  his 
peril.  But  somehow  or  other  the  average 
man  likes  this  new  type  better  and  does  not 
want  to  jeer  at  him,  but  goes  and  buys  his 
work  instead. 

[  125  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

Faint  though  distinct,  one  begins  to  hear 
the  new  note  of  exuberance  spreading  through 
the  arts.  On  canvas  it  registers  the  fact  that 
the  painters  are  migrating  in  hordes  to  live 
most  of  the  year  in  the  open  country.  It 
vibrates  in  the  sparkling  tone  of  the  new  type 
of  musical  performer  like  Willeke,  the  'cellist. 
Like  a  starter's  pistol  it  sounds  out  of  the  writ- 
ings of  hard-trained  men  of  the  hour  like 
John  Masefield  and  Alfred  Noyes.  One  has 
only  to  compare  the  overflowing  life  and  sanity 
of  workers  like  these  with  the  condition  of 
the  ordinary  "Out-of-the-way  young  man" 
to  see  what  a  gulf  yawns  between  exuberance 
and  exhaustion,  between  absolute  sanity  and 
a  state  somewhere  on  the  sunny  side  of  mild 
insanity.  And  I  believe  that  as  yet  we  catch 
only  a  faint  glimpse  of  the  glories  of  the 
physical  renaissance.  Wait  until  this  new 
religion  of  exuberance  is  a  few  generations 
older  and  eugenics  has  said  her  say! 

Curiously  enough,  the  decadent  artists  who 
pride  themselves  on  their  extreme  modernity 
[  126  ] 


VIM   AND    VISION 

are  the  ones  who  now  seem  to  cling  with  the 
most  reactionary  grip  to  the  old-fashioned, 
invertebrate  type  of  physique.  The  rest  are 
in  a  fair  way  to  undergo  such  a  change  as 
came  to  Queed,  the  sedentary  hero  of  Mr. 
Harrison's  novel,  when  he  took  up  boxing.  As 
sport  and  the  artists  come  closer  together, 
they  should  have  a  good  effect  on  one  another. 
The  artists  will  doubtless  make  sport  more 
formful,  rhythmical,  and  beautiful.  Sport, 
on  the  other  hand,  ought  before  long  to 
influence  the  arts  by  making  sportsmen  of 
the  artists. 

Now  good  sportsmanship  is  composed  of 
fairness,  team-work,  the  grace  of  a  good  loser, 
the  grace  of  a  good  winner,  modesty,  and 
gameness.  The  first  two  of  these  amount  to 
an  equitable  passion  for  a  fair  field  and  no 
favor,  and  a  willingness  to  subordinate  star- 
play,  or  personal  gain,  to  team-play,  or  com- 
munal gain.  Together  they  imply  a  feeling 
for  true  democracy.  To  be  converted  to  the 
religion  of  sportsmanship  means  to  become 
[  127  1 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

more  socially  minded.  I  think  it  is  more  than 
a  coincidence  that  at  the  moment  when  the 
artists  are  turning  to  sport,  their  work  is 
taking  on  the  brotherly  tone  of  democracy. 
The  call  of  brotherhood  is  to-day  one  of  the 
chief  preoccupations  of  poetry,  the  drama, 
ideal  sculpture,  and  mural  decoration.  For 
this  rapid  change  I  should  not  wonder  if  the 
democracy  of  sportsmanship  were  in  part 
responsible. 

The  third  element  of  sportsmanship  is  the 
grace  of  a  good  loser.  Artists  to-day  are 
better  losers  than  were  the  "foot-in-the-grave 
young  men."  Among  them  one  now  finds 
less  and  less  childish  petulance,  outspoken 
jealousy  of  others'  success,  and  apology  for 
their  own  failure.  Some  of  this  has  been 
shamed  out  of  them  by  discovering  that  the 
good  sportsman  never  apologizes  or  explains 
away  his  defeat.  And  they  are  importing 
these  manly  tactics  into  the  game  of  art.  It 
has  not  taken  them  long  to  see  how  ridiculous 
an  athlete  makes  himself  who  hides  behind 
[  128  ] 


VIM    AND    VISION 

the  excuse  of  sickness  or  lack  of  training. 
They  are  impressed  by  the  way  in  which  the 
non-apologetic  spirit  is  invading  the  less 
athletic  games,  even  down  to  such  a  sedentary 
affair  as  chess.  This  remarkable  rule,  for 
example,  was  proposed  in  the  recent  chess 
match  between  Lasker  and  Capablanca: 

Illness  shall  not  interfere  with  the  playing  of 
any  game,  on  the  ground  that  it  is  the  business  of 
the  players  so  to  train  themselves  that  their 
bodies  shall  be  in  perfect  condition;  and  it  is  their 
duty,  which  by  this  rule  is  enforced,  to  study  their 
health  and  live  accordingly. 

The  fourth  factor  of  sportsmanship  is  the 
grace  of  a  good  winner.  It  would  seem  as 
though  the  artist  were  learning  not  only  to 
keep  from  gloating  over  his  vanquished  rival, 
but  also  to  be  generous  and  minimize  his 
own  victory.  In  Gilbert's  day  the  failure  did 
all  the  apologizing.  To-day  less  apologizing 
is  done  by  the  failure  and  more  by  the  success. 
The  master  in  art  is  learning  modesty,  and 
from  whom  but  the  master  in  sport?  There 
[  129  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

are  in  the  arts  to-day  fewer  megalomaniacs 
and  persons  afflicted  with  delusions  of  gran- 
deur than  there  were  among  the  "Je-ne-sais- 
quoi  young  men."  Sport  has  made  them  more 
normal  spiritually,  while  making  them  more 
normal  physically.  It  has  kept  them  younger. 
Old  age  has  been  attacked  and  driven  back 
all  along  the  line.  One  reason  why  we  no 
longer  have  so  many  grand  old  men  is  that 
we  no  longer  have  so  many  old  men.  In- 
stead we  have  numbers  of  octogenarian 
sportsmen  like  the  late  Dr.  S.  Weir  Mitchell, 
who  have  not  yet  been  caught  by  the  arch- 
reactionary  fossil-collector,  Senility.  This  is 
a  fair  omen  for  the  future  of  progress.  "If 
only  the  leaders  of  the  world's  thought  and 
emotion,"  writes  Bourne  in  "Youth,"  "can, 
by  caring  for  the  physical  basis,  keep  them- 
selves young,  why,  the  world  will  go  far  to 
catching  up  with  itself  and  becoming  con- 
temporaneous . ' ' 

Gameness  is  the  final  factor  of  good  sports- 
manship.   In  the  matter  of  gameness,  I  grant 
[  130  1 


VIM    AND    VISION 

that  sport  has  little  to  teach  the  successful 
artist.  For  it  takes  courage,  dogged  persist- 
ence, resiliency  —  in  short,  the  never-say-die 
spirit  to  succeed  in  any  of  the  arts.  It  takes 
the  Browning  spirit  of  those  who 

"fall  to  rise,  are  baffled  to  fight  better,  sleep  to  wake." 

It  takes  the  typical  Anglo-Saxon  gameness  of 
Johnny  Armstrong  of  the  old  ballad: 

"Said  John,  'Fight  on,  my  merry  men  all. 
I  am  a  little  hurt,  but  I  am  not  slain; 
I  will  lay  me  down  for  to  bleed  a  while, 
And  then  I  '11  rise  and  fight  with  you  again.' " 

Yes,  but  what  of  the  weaker  brothers  and 
sisters  in  art  who  have  not  yet  succeeded  — 
perhaps  for  want  of  these  very  qualities? 
I  believe  that  a  newly  developed  spirit  of 
sportsmanship,  acting  upon  a  newly  devel- 
oped body,  will  presently  bring  to  many  a  dis- 
heartened struggler  just  that  increment  of 
resilient  gameness  which  will  mean  success 
instead  of  failure. 

Thus,  while  our  artists  show  a  tendency  to 
hark  back  to  the  Greek  physical  ideal,  they 
[  131  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

are  not  harking  backward  but  forward  when 
they  yield  to  the  mental  and  spiritual  influ- 
ences of  sportsmanship.  For  this  spirit  was 
unknown  to  the  ancient  world.  Until  yester- 
day art  and  sportsmanship  never  met.  But 
now  that  they  are  mating  I  am  confident  that 
there  will  come  of  this  union  sons  and  daugh- 
ters who  shall  joyfully  obey  the  summons 
that  is  still  ringing  down  to  us  over  the 
heads  of  the  anaemic  contemporaries  of  the 
exuberant  old  sportsman,  Walt  Whitman: 

"Poets  to  come!  orators,  singers,  musicians  to  come! 
Not  to-day  is  to  justify  me  and  answer  what  I  am  for, 
But  you,  a  new  brood,  native,  athletic,  continental, 

greater  than  before  known, 
Arouse!  for  you  must  justify  me." 


VII 

PRINTED   JOY 

The  old  joy  which  makes  us  more  debtors  to  poetry  than  any- 
thing else  in  life. 

RALPH  WALDO  EMERSON. 

AMERICA  is  trying  to  emerge  from  the 
awkward  age.  Its  body  is  full-grown. 
Its  spirit  is  still  crude  with  a  juvenile  crudity. 
What  does  this  spirit  need?  Next  to  contact 
with  true  religion,  it  most  needs  contact  with 
true  poetry.  It  needs  to  absorb  the  grace, 
the  wisdom,  the  idealistic  beauty  of  the  art, 
and  thrill  in  rhyme  with  poetry's  profound, 
spiritual  insights. 

The  promising  thing  is  that  America  is 
beginning  to  do  exactly  this  to-day.  The 
entire  history  of  our  enjoyment  of  poetry 
might  be  summed  up  in  that  curious  symbol 
which  appears  over  the  letter  n  in  the  word 
"canon."  A  rise,  a  fall,  a  rise.  Here  is  the 
whole  story  of  the  American  poetry-lover. 
[  133  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

His  enthusiasm  first  reached  a  high  point 
about  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
A  generation  later  it  fell  into  a  swift  decline. 
But  three  or  four  years  ago  it  began  to  revive 
so  rapidly  that  a  poetry-lover's  renaissance 
is  now  a  reality.  This  renaissance  has  not 
yet  been  explained,  although  the  majority 
of  readers  and  writers  feel  able  to  tell  why 
poetry  declined.  Let  us  glance  at  a  few  of 
the  more  popular  explanations. 

Many  say  that  poetry  declined  in  America 
because  we  turned  ourselves  into  a  nation  of 
entirely  prosaic  materialists.  But  if  this  is 
true,  how  do  they  explain  our  present  national 
solicitude  for  song-birds  and  waterfalls,  for 
groves  of  ancient  trees,  national  parks,  and 
city-planning?  How  do  they  explain  the  fact 
that  our  annual  expenditure  on  the  art  of 
music  is  six  times  that  of  Germany,  the 
Fatherland  of  Tone?  And  how  do  they  ac- 
count for  the  flourishing  condition  of  some  of 
our  other  arts?  If  we  are  hopelessly  material- 
istic, why  should  American  painters  and  sculp- 
[  134  ] 


PRINTED    JOY 

tors  have  such  a  high  world-standing?  And 
why  should  their  strongest,  most  original, 
most  significant  work  be  precisely  in  the  sphere 
of  poetic,  suggestive  landscape,  and  ideal 
sculpture?  The  answer  is  self-evident.  It 
is  no  utterly  prosaic  age,  and  people  that 
founded  our  superb  orchestras,  that  produced 
and  supported  Winslow  Homer,  Tryon,  and 
Woodbury,  French,  Barnard,  and  Saint  Gau- 
dens.  A  more  poetic  hand  than  Wall  Street's 
built  St.  Thomas's  and  the  cathedral,  ter- 
minals and  towers  of  New  York,  Trinity 
Church  in  Boston,  the  Minnesota  State 
Capitol,  Bar  Harbor's  Building  of  Arts, 
West  Point,  and  Princeton  University.  It  is 
plain  that  our  poetic  decline  was  not  wholly 
due  to  materialism. 

Other  philosophers  are  sure  that  whatever 
was  the  matter  with  poetry  was  the  fault  of 
the  poets  themselves.  Popular  interest  slack- 
ened, they  say,  because  the  art  first  degen- 
erated. Now  an  obvious  answer  to  this  is 
that  no  matter  how  dead  the  living  poets  of 
[  135  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

any  age  become,  men  may  always  turn,  if 
they  will,  to  those  dead  poets  of  old  who  live 
forever  on  their  shelves.  But  let  us  grant  for 
the  sake  of  argument  that  any  decline  of 
contemporary  poets  is  bound  to  effect  poetry- 
lovers  in  some  mysteriously  disastrous  way. 
And  let  us  recall  the  situation  back  there  in 
the  seventies  when  the  ebb  of  poetic  appre- 
ciation first  set  in.  At  that  time  Whittier, 
Holmes,  Emerson,  and  Whitman  had  only 
just  topped  the  crest  of  the  hill  of  accom- 
plishment, and  the  last-named  was  as  yet  no 
more  generally  known  than  was  the  rare 
genius  of  the  young  Lanier.  Longfellow,  who 
remains  even  to-day  the  most  popular  of  our 
poets,  was  still  in  full  swing.  Lowell  was  in 
his  prime.  Thus  it  appears  that  public  appre- 
ciation, and  not  creative  power,  was  the  first 
to  trip  and  topple  down  the  slopes  of  the  Par- 
nassian hill.  Not  until  then  did  the  poet  come 
"tumbling  after." 

Moreover,  in  the  light  of  modern  aesthetic 
psychology,  this  seems  the  more  natural  order 
[  136  ] 


PRINTED    JOY 

of  events.  It  takes  two  to  make  a  work  of 
art:  one  to  produce,  one  to  appreciate.  The 
creative  appreciator  is  a  correlative  of  all 
artistic  expression.  It  is  almost  impossible 
for  the  artist  to  accomplish  anything  amid 
the  destructive  atmosphere  exhaled  by  the 
ignorant,  the  stupid,  the  indifferent,  the  cal- 
lous, or  the  actively  hostile.  It  follows  that 
the  demand  for  poetry  is  created  no  more 
by  the  supply  than  the  supply  is  created  by 
the  demand.  Thus  the  general  indifference 
to  this  one  department  of  American  art  was 
not  primarily  caused  by  the  degenerating 
supply. 

The  decline  and  fall  of  our  poetic  empire 
have  yet  other  Gibbons  who  say  that  our 
civilization  suddenly  changed  from  the  coun- 
try to  the  urban  type,  and  that  our  love 
of  poetry  began  to  disappear  simultaneously 
with  the  general  exodus  from  the  country- 
side and  the  mushroom  growth  of  the  large 
cities.  So  far  I  agree;  but  not  with  their  rea- 
son. For  they  say  that  poetry  declined  be- 
[  137  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

cause  cities  are  such  dreadfully  unpoetic 
things;  because  they  have  become  synony- 
mous only  with  riveting-machines  and  the  kind 
of  building  that  the  Germans  call  the  "heaven- 
scratcher,"  with  elevated  railways,  "sand 
hogs,"  whirring  factories,  and  alleys  reeking 
with  the  so-called  "dregs"  of  Europe.  They 
claim  that  the  new  and  hopelessly  vulgar 
creed  of  the  modern  city  is  epitomized  by 
such  things  as  a  certain  signboard  in  New 
York,  which  offers  a  typically  neo-urban  solu- 
tion of  the  old  problem,  "What  is  art?" 


PARAGON  PANTS 
ARE  ART 


the  board  declares.     And  this,  they  say,  is 
about  as  poetic  as  a  large  city  ever  becomes. 

Now  let  us  glance  for  a  moment  at  the 
poems   in   prose   and    verse   of   Mr.    James 
Oppenheim,  a  young  man  for  whom  a  me- 
tropolis is  almost  completely  epitomized  by 
[  138  1 


PRINTED    JOY 

the  riveting-machine,  the  sweat-shop,  and  the 
slum.  There  we  discover  that  this  poet's 
vision  has  pierced  straight  through  the  city's 
veneer  of  ugly  commonplace  to  the  beauty 
shimmering  beneath.  In  his  eyes  the  sinewy, 
heroic  forms  of  the  builders,  clinging  high 
on  their  frail  scaffoldings  and  nonchalantly 
hurling  red-hot  rivets  through  space,  are 
so  many  young  gods  at  play  with  elemental 
forces.  The  sweat-shop  is  transmuted  into  as 
grim  and  glorious  a  battlefield  as  any  Tours 
or  Gettysburg  of  them  all.  And  the  dingy, 
battered  old  "L"  train,  as  it  clatters  through 
the  East  Side  early  on  "morose,  gray  Monday 
morning,"  becomes  a  divine  chariot 

"winging  through  Deeps  of  the  Lord  with  its  eighty 
Earth-anchored  Souls." 

Oh,  yes;  there  is  "God's  plenty"  of  poetry 
in  these  sights  and  sounds,  if  only  one  looks 
deep  enough  to  discover  the  beauty  of  home- 
liness. But  there  is  even  more  of  beauty  and 
poetic  inspiration  to  be  drawn  from  the  city 
[  139  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

by  him  who,  instead  of  thus  straitly  con- 
fining his  gaze  to  any  one  aspect  of  urban 
life,  is  able  to  see  it  steadily  and  see  it 
whole,  with  its  subtle  nuances  and  its  over- 
powering dramatic  contrasts  —  as  a  twen- 
tieth-century Walt  Whitman,  for  example, 
might  see  it  if  he  had  a  dash  of  Tennyson's 
technical  equipment,  of  Arnold's  sculpturesque 
polish  and  restraint,  of  Lanier's  instinct  for 
sensuous  beauty.  What  "songs  greater  than 
before  known"  might  such  a  poet  not  sing  as 
he  wandered  close  to  precious  records  of  the 
Anglo-Saxon  culture  of  the  race  amid  the 
stately  colonial  peace  and  simplicity  of  St. 
Mark's  church-yard,  with  the  vividly  colored 
life  of  all  southeastern  Europe  surging  about 
that  slender  iron  fence  —  children  of  the 
blood  of  Chopin  and  Tschaikowsky;  of  Gut- 
enberg, Kossuth,  and  Napoleon;  of  Isaiah 
and  Plato,  Leonardo  and  Dante  —  with  the 
wild  strains  of  the  gypsy  orchestra  floating 
across  Second  Avenue,  and  to  the  southward 
a  glimpse  aloft  in  a  rarer,  purer  air  of  builders 
[  140  1 


PRINTED    JOY 

V 

clambering  on  the  cupola  of  a  neighboring 
Giotto's  tower  built  of  steel?  Who  dares  say 
that  the  city  is  unpoetic?  It  is  one  of  the 
most  poetic  places  on  earth. 

These,  then,  are  the  chief  explanations 
which  have  been  offered  us  to-day  of  the 
historic  decline  of  the  American  poetry-lover. 
We  weigh  them,  and  find  them  wanting. 
'  Why?  Because  they  have  sought,  like  radio- 
graphers, far  beneath  the  surf  ace;  whereas  the 
real  trouble  has  been  only  skin  deep.  I  shall 
try  to  show  the  nature  of  this  trouble;  and 
how,  by  beginning  to  cure  it,  we  have  already 
brought  on  a  poetic  renaissance. 

Most  of  us  who  care  for  poetry  frequently 
have  one  experience  in  common.  During  our 
summer  vacations  in  the  country  we  suddenly 
re-discover  the  well-thumbed  "Golden  Treas- 
ury" of  Palgrave,  and  the  "Oxford  Book  of 
Verse"  which  have  been  so  unaccountably 
neglected  during  the  city  winter.  We  wander 
farther  into  the  poetic  fields  and  revel  in  Keats 
and  Shakespeare.  We  may  even  attempt  once 
[  141  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

more  to  get  beyond  the  first  book  of  the 
"  Faerie  Queene,"  or  fumble  again  at  the 
combination  lock  which  seems  to  guard  the 
meaning  of  the  second  part  of  "Faust."  And 
we  find  these  occupations  so  invigorating  and 
joyful  that  we  model  and  cast  an  iron  resolu- 
tion to  the  effect  that  this  winter,  whatever 
betide,  we  will  read  a  little  poetry  every  day, 
or  every  week,  as  the  case  may  be.  On  that 
we  plunge  back  into  the  beautiful,  poetic, 
inspiring  city,  and  adhere  to  our  poetry- 
reading  program  —  for  exactly  a  fortnight. 
Then,  unaccountably,  our  resolve  begins  to 
slacken.  We  cannot  seem  to  settle  our  minds 
to  ordered  rhythms  "where  more  is  meant 
than  meets  the  ear."  Our  resolve  collapses. 
Once  again  Palgrave  is  covered  with  dust. 
But  vacation  time  returns.  After  a  few  days 
in  green  pastures  and  beside  still  waters  the 
soul  suddenly  turns  like  a  homing-pigeon  to 
poetry.  And  the  old,  perplexing  cycle  begins 
anew. 

A  popular  magazine   once   sent  a  certain 
[  142  ] 


PRINTED   JOY 

young  writer  and  ardent  amateur  of  poetry  on 
a  long  journey  through  the  Middle  West. 
He  took  but  one  book  in  his  bag.  It  was  by 
Whitman  (the  poet  of  cities,  mark).  And  he 
determined  to  read  it  every  evening  in  his 
bedroom  after  the  toils  of  the  day.  The  first 
part  of  the  trip  ran  in  the  country.  "Afoot 
and  light-hearted"  he  took  to  the  open  road 
every  morning,  and  reveled  every  evening  in 
such  things  as  "Manahatta,"  "The  Song  of 
Joys,"  and  "  Crossing  Brooklyn  Ferry."  Then 
he  carried  his  poet  of  cities  to  a  city.  But 
the  two  would  have  nothing  to  do  with  one 
another.  And  to  the  traveler's  perplexity, 
a  place  no  larger  than  Columbus,  Ohio,  put 
a  violent  end  to  poetry  on  that  trip. 

In  our  day  most  poetry-lovers  have  had 
such  experiences.  These  have  been  hard  to 
explain,  however,  only  because  their  cause  has 
been  probed  for  too  profoundly.  The  chief 
cause  of  the  decline  of  poetry  was  not  spiritual 
but  physical.  Cities  are  not  unpoetic  in  spirit. 
It  is  only  in  the  physical  sense  that  Emerson's 
[  143  1 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

warning  is  true:  "If  thou  fill  thy  brain  with 
Boston  and  New  York  .  .  .  thou  shalt  find 
no  radiance  of  meaning  in  the  lonely  wastes 
of  the  pine  woods."  The  trouble  was  this: 
that  the  modern  type  of  city,  when  it  started 
into  being,  back  in  the  seventies,  began  to  take 
from  men,  and  to  use  up,  that  margin  of 
nervous  energy,  that  exuberant  overplus  of 
vitality  of  which  so  much  has  already  been 
said  in  this  book,  and  which  is  always  needed 
for  the  true  appreciation  of  poetry.  Grant 
Allen  has  shown  that  man,  when  he  is  con- 
scious of  a  superfluity  of  sheer  physical 
strength,  gives  himself  to  play;  and  in  like 
manner,  when  he  is  conscious  of  a  superfluity 
of  receptive  power,  which  has  a  physical  basis, 
he  gives  himself  to  art. 

Now,  though  all  of  the  arts  demand  of 
their  appreciators  this  overplus  of  nervous 
energy  (and  Heaven  knows  perfectly  well  how 
inadequate  a  supply  is  offered  up  to  music 
and  the  arts  of  design!),  yet  the  appreciation 
of  poetry  above  that  of  the  sister  arts  demands 
[  144  ] 


PRINTED    JOY 

this  bloom  on  the  cheek  of  existence.  For 
poetry,  with  quite  as  much  of  emotional 
demand  as  the  others,  combines  a  consider- 
ably greater  and  more  persistent  intellectual 
demand,  involving  an  unusual  amount  of 
physical  wear  and  tear.  Hence,  in  an  era  of 
overstrain,  poetry  is  the  first  of  the  arts  to 
suffer. 

Most  lovers  of  poetry  must  realize,  when 
they  come  to  consider  it,  that  their  pleasure 
in  verse  rises  and  falls,  like  the  column  of 
mercury  in  a  barometer,  with  the  varying 
levels  of  their  physical  overplus.  Physical 
overplus,  however,  is  the  thing  which  life  in  a 
modern  city  is  best  calculated  to  keep  down. 

Surely  it  was  no  mere  coincidence  that, 
back  there  hi  the  seventies,  just  at  the  edge 
of  the  poetic  decline,  city  life  began  to  grow 
so  immoderately  in  volume  and  to  be  "speeded 
up"  and  "noised  up"  so  abruptly  that  it  took 
our  bodies  by  surprise.  This  process  has  kept 
on  so  furiously  that  the  bodies  of  most  of  us 
have  never  been  able  to  catch  up.  No  large 
[  145  1 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

number  have  yet  succeeded  in  readjusting 
themselves  completely  to  the  new  pace  of 
the  city.  And  this  continues  to  exact  from 
most  of  us  more  nervous  energy  than  any  life 
may,  which  would  keep  us  at  our  best.  Hence, 
until  we  have  succeeded  either  in  accomplish- 
ing the  readjustment,  or  in  spending  more 
time  in  the  country,  the  appreciation  of  poetry 
has  continued  to  suffer. 

Even  in  the  country,  it  is,  of  course,  per- 
fectly true  that  life  spins  faster  now  than  it 
used  to  —  what  with  telephones  and  inter- 
urban  trolleys,  the  motor,  and  the  R.F.D. 
But  this  rural  progress  has  arrived  with  no 
such  stunning  abruptness  as  to  outdistance 
our  powers  of  readjustment.  When  we  go 
from  city  to  country  we  recede  to  a  rate  of 
living  with  which  our  nervous  systems  can 
comfortably  fall  in,  and  still  control  for  the 
use  of  the  mind  and  spirit  a  margin  of  that 
delicious  vital  bloom  which  resembles  the 
ring  of  the  overtones  in  some  beautiful  voice. 

But  how  is  it  practicable  to  keep  this 
[  146  ] 


PRINTED    JOY 

margin  in  the  city,  when  the  roar  of  noisy 
traffic  over  noisy  pavements,  the  shrieks 
of  newsboy  and  peddler,  the  all-pervading 
chronic  excitement,  the  universal  obligation 
to  "step  lively,"  even  at  a  funeral,  are  every 
instant  laying  waste  our  conscious  or  uncon- 
scious powers?  How  are  we  to  give  the  life 
of  the  spirit  its  due  of  poetry  when  our  pre- 
cious margin  is  forever  leaking  away  through 
lowered  vitality  and  even  sickness  due  to 
lack  of  sleep,  unhygienic  surroundings,  con- 
stant interruption  (or  the  expectation  thereof), 
and  the  impossibility  of  relaxation  owing  to 
the  never-ending  excitement  and  interest  and 
sexual  stimulus  of  the  great  human  pageant 
—  its  beauty  and  suggestiveness? 

Apart  from  the  general  destruction  of  the 
margin  of  energy,  one  special  thing  that  the 
new  form  of  city  life  does  to  injure  poetry 
is  to  keep  uppermost  in  men's  consciousness 
a  feverish  sense  of  the  importance  of  the  pres- 
ent moment.  We  might  call  this  sense  the 
journalistic  spirit  of  the  city.  How  many 
[  147] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

typical  metropolitans  one  knows  who  are 
forever  in  a  small  flutter  of  excitement  over 
whatever  is  just  happening,  like  a  cub  reporter 
on  the  way  to  his  first  fire,  or  a  neuraesthete 
—  if  one  may  coin  a  word  —  who  perceives 
a  spider  on  her  collarette.  This  habit  of 
mind  soon  grows  stereotyped,  and  is,  of  course, 
immensely  stimulated  by  the  multitudinous 
editions  of  our  innumerable  newspapers.  The 
city  gets  one  to  living  so  intensely  in  the  pres- 
ent minute,  and  often  in  the  very  most  sen- 
sational second  of  that  minute,  that  one  grows 
impatient  of  the  "olds,"  and  comes  to  regard 
a  constantly  renewed  and  increased  dose  of 
"news"  as  the  only  present  help  in  a  chronic 
time  of  trouble.  This  is  a  kind  of  mental 
drug-habit.  And  its  origin  is  physical.  It 
is  a  morbid  condition  induced  by  the  over- 
paced  life  of  cities. 

Long  before  the  rise  of  the  modern  city  — 

indeed,  more  than  a  century  ago  —  Goethe, 

who  was  considerably  more  than  a  century 

ahead  of  his  age,  wrote  to  Schiller  from  Frank- 

[  148  ] 


PRINTED    JOY 

fort  of  the  journalistic  spirit  of  cities  and  its 
relation  to  poetry: 

It  seems  to  me  very  remarkable  how  things 
stand  with  the  people  of  a  large  city.  They  live 
in  a  constant  delirium  of  getting  and  consuming, 
and  the  thing  we  call  atmosphere  can  neither  be 
brought  to  their  attention  nor  communicated  to 
them.  All  recreations,  even  the  theater,  must 
be  mere  distractions;  and  the  great  weakness  of 
the  reading  public  for  newspapers  and  romances 
comes  just  from  the  fact  that  the  former  always, 
and  the  latter  generally,  brings  distraction  into 
the  distraction.  Indeed,  I  believe  that  I  have 
noticed  a  sort  of  dislike  of  poetic  productions  —  or 
at  least  in  so  far  as  they  are  poetic  —  which  seems 
to  me  to  follow  quite  naturally  from  these  very 
causes.  Poetry  requires,  yes,  it  absolutely  com- 
mands, concentration.  It  isolates  man  against 
his  own  will.  It  forces  itself  upon  him  again  and 
again;  and  is  as  uncomfortable  a  possession  as  a 
too  constant  mistress. 

If  this  reporter's  attitude  of  mind  was  so 
rampant  in  cultivated  urban  Germany  a  cen- 
tury ago  as  to  induce  "a  sort  of  dislike  of 
poetic  productions,"  what  sort  of  dislike  of 
them  must  it  not  be  inducing  to-day?  For 
the  appreciation  of  poetry  cannot  live  under 
[  149  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

the  same  roof  with  the  journalistic  spirit. 
The  art  needs  long,  quiet  vistas  backward 
and  forward,  such  as  are  to  be  had  daily  on 
one  of  those  "lone  heaths"  where  Hazlitt 
used  to  love  to  stalk  ideas,  but  such  as  are  not 
to  be  met  with  in  Times  Square  or  the  Subway. 

The  joyful  side  of  the  situation  is  that  this 
need  is  being  met.  A  few  years  ago  the  city 
dwellers  of  America  began  to  return  to  nature. 
The  movement  spread  until  every  one  who 
could  afford  it,  habitually  fled  from  the  city 
for  as  long  a  summer  outing  as  possible. 
More  and  more  people  learned  the  delightful 
sport  of  turning  an  abandoned  farm  into  a 
year-round  country  estate.  The  man  who 
was  tied  to  a  city  office  formed  the  commuting 
habit,  thus  keeping  his  wife  and  children  per- 
manently away  from  the  wear  and  tear  of 
town.  The  suburban  area  was  immensely 
increased  by  the  rapid  spread  of  motoring. 

Thus,  it  was  recently  made  possible  for 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  Americans  to  live, 
at  least  a  considerable  part  of  the  year,  where 
[  150  ] 


PRINTED    JOY 

they  could  hoard  up  an  overplus  of  vitality. 
The  result  was  that  these  well-vitalized  per- 
sons, whenever  they  returned  to  the  city, 
were  better  able  to  stand  —  and  adjust  them- 
selves to  —  the  severe  urban  pace,  than  were 
the  fagged  city  people.  It  was  largely  by 
the  impact  of  this  new  vitality  that  the  city 
was  roused  to  the  importance  of  physical 
efficiency,  so  that  it  went  in  for  parks,  gym- 
nasia, baths,  health  and  welfare  campaigns, 
athletic  fields,  playgrounds,  Boy  Scouts, 
Campfire  Girls,  and  the  like. 

There  are  signs  everywhere  that  we  Ameri- 
cans have,  by  wise  living,  begun  to  win  back 
the  exuberance  which  we  lost  at  the  rise  of 
the  modern  city.  One  of  the  surest  indications 
of  this  is  the  fact  that  the  nation  has  suddenly 
begun  to  read  poetry  again,  very  much  as 
the  exhausted  poetry-lover  instinctively  turns 
again  to  his  Palgrave  during  the  third  week 
of  vacation.  In  returning  to  neglected  nature 
we  are  returning  to  the  most  neglected  of  the 
arts.  The  renaissance  of  poetry  is  here. 
[  151  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

And  men  like  Masefield,  Noyes,  and  Tagore 
begin  to  vie  in  popularity  with  the  moderately 
popular  novelists.  Moreover  this  is  only  the 
beginning.  Aviation  has  come  and  is  remind- 
ing us  of  the  ancient  prophecy  of  H.  G.  Wells 
that  the  suburbs  of  a  city  like  New  York  will 
now  soon  extend  from  Washington  to  Albany. 
Urban  centers  are  being  diffused  fast;  but 
social-mindedness  is  being  diffused  faster. 
Men  are  wishing  more  and  more  to  share  with 
each  brother  man  the  brimming  cup  of  life. 
Aircraft  and  true  democracy  are  on  the  way 
to  bear  all  to  the  land  of  perpetual  exuber- 
ance. And  on  their  wings  the  poet  will  again 
mount  to  that  height  of  authority  and  esteem 
from  which,  in  the  healthful,  athletic  days  of 
old,  Homer  and  Sophocles  dominated  the 
minds  and  spirits  of  their  fellow-men.  That 
is  to  say  —  he  will  mount  if  we  let  him.  In 
the  following  chapter  I  shall  endeavor  to  show 
why  the  American  poet  has  as  yet  scarcely 
begun  to  share  in  the  poetry-renaissance. 


VIII 

THE  JOYFUL  HEART  FOR  POETS 

Nothing  probably  is  more  dangerous  for  the  human  race  than 
science  without  poetry,  civilization  without  culture. 

HOUSTON  STEWABT  CHAMBERLAIN. 

A  poet  in  history  is  divine,  but  a  poet  in  the  next  room  is  a 
joke.  MAX  EASTMAN. 

IN  the  last  two  chapters  we  have  seen  the 
contemporary  master  of  various  arts,  and 
the  reader  of  poetry,  engaged  in  cultivating 
the  joyful  heart.  But  there  is  one  artist  who 
has  not  yet  been  permitted  to  join  in  this 
agreable  pastime.  He  is  the  American  poet. 
And  as  his  inclusion  would  be  an  even  more 
joyful  thing  for  his  land  than  for  himself,  this 
book  may  not  ignore  him. 

The  American  poet  has  not  yet  begun  to 
keep  pace  with  the  poetry-lovers'  renaissance. 
He  is  no  very  arresting  figure;  and  therefore 
you,  reader,  are  already  considering  a  skip  to 
chapter  nine.  Well,  if  you  are  no  more  inter- 
l  153  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

ested  in  him  or  his  possibilities  than  is  the 
average  American  consumer  of  British  poetry 

—  I  counsel  you  by  all  means  to  skip  in 
peace.    But  if  you  are  one  of  the  few  who 
discern  the  promise  of  a  vast  power  latent  in 
the  American  poet,  and  would  gladly  help  in 
releasing  this  power  for  the  good  of  the  race, 
I  can  show  you  what  is  the  matter  with  him 
and  what  to  do  about  it. 

Why  has  the  present  renaissance  of  the 
poetry-lover  not  brought  with  it  a  renais- 
sance of  the  American  poet?  Almost  every 
reason  but  the  true  one  has  been  given. 
The  true  reason  is  that  our  poets  are  tired. 
They  became  exhausted  a  couple  of  genera- 
tions ago;  and  we  have  kept  them  in  this  con- 
dition ever  since.  In  the  previous  chapter 
we  saw  how  city  life  began  abruptly  to  be 
speeded  up  in  the  seventies.  At  that  time  the 
poet  —  like  almost  every  one  else  in  the  city 

—  was  unable  to  readjust  his  body  at  once  to 
the  new  pace.    He  was  like  a  six-day  bicycle 
racer  who  should  be  lapped  in  a  sudden  and 

[  154  1 


FOR    POETS 

continued  sprint.  That  sprint  is  still  going  on. 
Never  again  has  the  American  poet  felt  the 
abounding  energy  with  which  he  began.  And 
never  has  he  overtaken  the  leaders. 

The  reason  why  the  poet  is  tired  is  that  he 
lives  in  the  over-paced  city.  The  reason  why 
he  lives  hi  the  city  is  that  he  is  chained  to  it 
by  the  nature  of  his  hack-work.  And  the 
reason  for  the  hack-work  is  that  the  poet  is 
the  only  one  of  all  the  artists  whose  art  almost 
never  offers  him  a  living.  He  alone  is  forced 
to  earn  in  other  ways  the  luxury  of  perform- 
ing his  appointed  task  in  the  world.  For,  as 
Goethe  once  observed,  "people  are  so  used  to 
regarding  poetic  talent  as  a  free  gift  of  the 
gods  that  they  think  the  poet  should  be  as 
free-handed  with  the  public  as  the  gods  have 
been  with  him." 

The  poet  is  tired.  Great  art,  however,  is 
not  the  product  of  exhaustion,  but  of  exuber- 
ance. It  will  have  none  of  the  skimmed 
milk  of  mere  existence.  Nothing  less  than  the 
thick,  pure  cream  of  abounding  vitality  will 
[  155  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

do.  The  exhausted  artist  has  but  three  courses 
open  to  him:  either  to  stimulate  himself  into 
a  counterfeit,  and  suicidally  brief,  exuber- 
ance; or  to  relapse  into  mediocrity;  or  to  gain 
a  healthy  fullness  of  life. 

In  the  previous  chapter  it  was  shown  why 
poetry  demands  more  imperatively  than  any 
other  art,  that  the  appreciator  shall  bring  to 
it  a  margin  of  vitality.  For  a  like  reason 
poetry  makes  this  same  inordinate  demand 
upon  its  maker.  It  insists  that  he  shall  keep 
himself  even  more  keenly  alive  than  the  maker 
of  music  or  sculpture,  painting  or  architec- 
ture. This  is  the  reason  why,  in  the  present 
era  of  overstrain,  the  poet's  art  has  been  so 
swift  to  succumb  and  so  slow  to  recuperate. 

The  poet  who  is  obliged  to  live  in  the  city 
has  not  yet  been  able  to  readjust  his  body  to 
the  pace  of  modern  urban  life,  so  that  he  may 
live  among  its  never-ending  conscious  and 
unconscious  stimulations  and  still  keep  on 
hand  a  triumphant  reserve  of  vitality  to  pour 
into  his  poems.  Under  these  new  and  strenu- 
[  156  1 


FOR    POETS 

ous  conditions,  very  little  real  poetry  has 
been  written  in  our  cities.  American  poets, 
despite  their  genuine  love  of  town  and  their 
struggles  to  produce  worthy  lines  amid  its 
turmoil,  have  almost  invariably  done  the 
best  of  their  actually  creative  work  during 
the  random  moments  that  could  be  snatched 
in  wood  and  meadow,  by  weedy  marsh  or 
rocky  headland.  To  his  friends  it  was  touch- 
ing to  see  with  what  wistfulness  Richard 
Watson  Gilder  used  to  seek  his  farm  at  Tyring- 
ham  for  a  day  or  two  of  poetry  after  a  fort- 
night of  furious  office  life.  Even  Walt  Whit- 
man —  poet  of  cities  that  he  was  —  had  to 
retire  "precipitate"  from  his  beloved  Mana- 
hatta  in  order  fitly  to  celebrate  her  perfec- 
tions. In  fact,  Stedman  was  perhaps  the 
only  one  of  our  more  important  singers  at 
the  close  of  the  century  who  could  do  his  best 
work  in  defiance  of  Emerson's  injunction  to 
the  poet:  "Thou  shalt  lie  close  hid  with 
Nature,  and  canst  not  be  afforded  to  the 
Capitol  or  the  Exchange."  But  it  is  pleas- 
[  157  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

ant  to  recall  how  even  that  poetic  banker 
brightened  up  and  let  his  soul  expand  in  the 
peace  of  the  country. 

One  reason  for  the  rapidly  growing  prepon- 
derance of  women  —  and  especially  of  un- 
married women  —  among  our  poetic  leaders 
is,  I  think,  to  be  found  in  the  fact  that 
women,  more  often  than  men,  command  the 
means  of  living  for  a  generous  portion  of  the 
year  that  vital,  unstrenuous,  contemplative 
existence  demanded  by  poetry  as  an  ante- 
cedent condition  of  its  creation.  It  is  a 
significant  fact  that,  according  to  Arnold 
Bennett,  nearly  all  of  the  foremost  English 
writers  live  far  from  the  town.  Most  of  the 
more  promising  American  poets  of  both  sexes, 
however,  have  of  late  had  little  enough  to 
do  with  the  country.  And  the  result  is  that 
the  supreme  songs  of  the  twentieth  century 
have  remained  unsung,  to  eat  out  the  hearts 
of  their  potential  singers.  For  fate  has 
thrown  most  of  our  poets  quite  on  their  own 
resources,  so  that  they  have  been  obliged  to 
[  158  ] 


FOR    POETS 

live  in  the  large  cities,  supporting  life  within 
the  various  kinds  of  hack-harness  into  which 
the  uncommercially  shaped  withers  of  Peg- 
asus can  be  forced.  Such  harness,  I  mean,  as 
journalism,  editing,  compiling,  reading  for 
publishers,  hack-article  writing,  and  so  on. 
Fate  has  also  seen  to  it  that  the  poet's  make-up 
is  seldom  conspicuous  by  reason  of  a  bull- 
neck,  pugilistic  limbs,  and  the  nervous  equi- 
poise of  a  dray-horse.  What  he  may  lack  in 
strength,  however,  he  is  apt  to  make  up  in 
hectic  ambition.  Thus  it  often  happens  that 
when  the  city  does  not  consume  quite  all  of 
his  available  energy,  the  poet,  with  his  prob- 
ably inadequate  physique,  chafes  against  the 
hack-work  and  yields  to  the  call  of  the  luring 
creative  ideas  that  constantly  beset  him. 
Then,  after  yielding,  he  chafes  again,  and 
more  bitterly,  at  his  faint,  imperfect  expres- 
sion of  these  dreams,  recognizing  in  despair 
that  he  has  been  creating  a  mere  crude  by- 
product of  the  strenuous  life  about  him.  So 
he  burns  the  torch  of  life  at  both  ends,  and 
[  159  ] 


THE   JOYFUL   HEART 

the  superhuman  speed  of  'modern  existence 
eats  it  through  in  the  middle.  Then  suddenly 
the  light  fails  altogether. 

Those  poets  alone  who  have  unusual  physi- 
cal endurance  are  able  to  do  even  a  small 
amount  of  steady,  fine-grained  work  in  the 
city.  The  rest  are  as  effectually  debarred 
from  it  as  factory  children  are  debarred  from 
learning  the  violin  well  at  the  fag  end  of  their 
days  of  toil.  In  her  autobiography  Miss 
Jane  Addams  speaks  some  luminous  words 
about  the  state  of  society  which  forces  finely 
organized  artistic  talent  into  the  wearing 
struggle  for  mere  existence.  She  refers  to  it 
as  "one  of  the  haunting  problems  of  life;  why 
do  we  permit  the  waste  of  this  most  precious 
human  faculty,  this  consummate  possession 
of  all  civilization?  When  we  fail  to  provide 
the  vessel  in  which  it  may  be  treasured,  it 
runs  out  upon  the  ground  and  is  irretrievably 
lost." 

I  wonder  if  we  have  ever  stopped  to  ask 
ourselves  why  so  many  of  our  more  recent 
[  160  ] 


FOR    POETS 

poets  have  died  young.  Was  it  the  hand  of 
God,  or  the  effort  to  do  the  work  of  two  in  a 
hostile  environment,  that  struck  down  before 
their  prime  such  spirits  as  Sidney  Lanier, 
Edward  Rowland  Sill,  Frederic  Lawrence 
Knowles,  Arthur  Upson,  Richard  Hovey, 
William  Vaughn  Moody,  and  the  like?  These 
were  poets  whom  we  bound  to  the  strenuous 
city,  or  at  least  to  hack-work  which  sapped 
over-much  of  their  vitality.  An  old  popular 
fallacy  keeps  insisting  that  genius  "will  out." 
This  is  true,  but  only  in  a  sadder  sense  than 
the  stupidly  proverbial  one.  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  the  light  of  genius  is  all  too  easily  blown 
out  and  trampled  out  by  a  blind  and  deaf 
world.  But  we  of  America  are  loath  to  admit 
this.  And  if  we  do  not  think  of  genius  as  an 
unquenchable  flame,  we  are  apt  to  think  of  it 
as  an  amazingly  hardy  plant,  more  tough  than 
horse-brier  or  cactus.  Only  a  few  of  us  have 
yet  begun  to  realize  that  the  flower  of  genius 
is  not  the  flower  of  an  indestructible  weed,  but 
of  a  fastidious  exotic,  which  usually  demands 
[  161  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

good  conditions  for  bare  existence,  and  needs 
a  really  excellent  environment  and  constant 
tending  if  it  is  to  thrive  and  produce  the  finest 
possible  blooms.  Mankind  has  usually  shown 
enormous  solicitude  lest  the  man  of  genius  be 
insufficiently  supplied  with  that  trouble  and 
sorrow  which  is  supposed  to  be  quite  indis- 
pensable to  his  best  work.  But  here  and  there 
the  thinkers  are  beginning  to  realize  that  the 

irritable,  impulsive,  impractical  nature  of  the 

i 

genius,  in  even  the  most  favorable  environ- 
ment, is  formed  for  trouble  "as  the  sparks  to 
fly  upward."  They  see  that  fortune  has 
slain  its  hundreds  of  geniuses,  but  trouble  its 
ten  thousands.  And  they  conclude  that  their 
own  real  solicitude  should  be,  not  lest  the 
genius  have  too  little  adversity  to  contend 
with,  but  lest  he  have  too  much. 

We  have  heard  not  a  little  about  the  con- 
servation of  land,  ore,  wood,  and  water.  The 
poetry  problem  concerns  itself  with  an  older 
sort  of  conservation  about  which  we  heard 
much  even  as  youngsters  in  college.  I  mean 
[  162  1 


FOR    POETS 

the  conservation  of  energy.  Our  poetry  will 
never  emerge  from  the  dusk  until  either  the 
bodies  of  our  city-prisoned  poets  manage  to 
overtake  the  speeding-up  process  and  read- 
just themselves  to  it  —  or  until  we  allow  them 
an  opportunity  to  return  for  an  appreciable 
part  of  every  year  to  the  country  —  the  place 
where  the  poet  belongs. 

It  is  true  that  the  masters  of  the  other 
arts  have  not  fared  any  too  well  at  our  hands; 
but  they  do  not  need  help  as  badly  by  far 
as  the  poets  need  it.  What  with  commis- 
sions and  sales,  scholarships,  fellowships,  and 
substantial  prizes,  the  painters  and  sculptors 
and  architects  and  even  the  musicians  have, 
broadly  speaking,  been  able  to  learn  and  prac- 
tise their  art  in  that  peace  and  security  which 
is  well-nigh  essential  to  all  artistic  appren- 
ticeship and  productive  mastery.  They  have 
usually  been  able  to  spend  more  of  the 
year  in  the  country  than  the  poet.  And 
even  when  bound  as  fast  as  he  to  the  city, 
they  have  not  been  forced  to  choose  between 
[  163  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

burning  the  candle  at  both  ends  or  abandon- 
ing their  art. 

But  for  some  recondite  reason  —  perhaps 
because  this  art  cannot  be  taught  at  all  —  it 
has  always  been  an  accepted  American  con- 
viction that  poetry  is  a  thing  which  may  be 
thrown  off  at  any  tune  as  a  side  issue  by  highly 
organized  persons,  most  of  whose  time  and 
strength  and  faculties  are  engaged  in  a  vigor- 
ous and  engrossing  hand-to-hand  bout  with 
the  wolf  on  the  threshold  —  a  most  practical, 
philistine  wolf,  moreover,  which  never  heard 
of  rhyme  or  rhythm,  and  whose  whole  ac- 
quaintance with  prosody  is  confined  to  a  cer- 
tain greedy  familiarity  with  frayed  masculine 
and  feminine  endings. 

As  a  result  of  this  common  conviction  our 
poets  have  almost  invariably  been  obliged 
to  make  their  art  a  quite  subsidiary  and  hap- 
hazard affair,  like  the  rearing  of  children  by  a 
mother  who  is  forced  to  go  out  and  scrub  from 
early  morning  till  late  at  night  and  has  to 
leave  little  Johnnie  tied  in  his  high  chair  to 
[  164  ] 


FOR    POETS 

be  fed  by  an  older  sister  on  crusts  dabbled  in 
the  pot  of  cold  coffee.  No  wonder  that  so 
much  of  our  verse  "jest  growed,"  like  Topsy. 
And  the  resulting  state  of  things  has  but 
served  to  reinforce  our  belief  that  to  make 
the  race  of  poets  spend  their  days  in  correct- 
ing encyclopaedia  proof,  or  clerking,  or  running, 
notebook  in  hand,  to  fires  —  inheres  hi  the 
eternal  fitness  of  things. 

Bergson  says  in  "Creative  Evolution,"  that 
"an  intelligence  which  reflects  is  one  that 
originally  had  a  surplus  of  energy  to  spend, 
over  and  above  practically  useful  efforts." 
Does  it  not  follow  that  when  we  make  the 
poet  spend  all  his  energy  in  the  practically 
useful  effort  of  running  to  fires,  we  prevent 
him  from  enjoying  the  very  advantage  which 
made  man  a  reflective  being,  to  say  nothing 
of  a  poet? 

Perhaps  we  have  never  yet  realized  that 
this  attitude  of  ours  would  turn  poetic  suc- 
cess into  a  question  of  the  survival  of  that 
paradox,  the  commercially  shrewd  poet,  or 
[  165  1 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

of  the  poet  who  by  some  happy  accident  of 
birth  or  marriage  has  been  given  an  income, 
or  of  that  prodigy  of  versatility  who,  in  our 
present  stage  of  civilization,  besides  being 
mentally  and  spiritually  fit  for  the  poet's 
calling,  is  also  physically  fit  to  bear  the  strain 
of  doing  two  men's  work;  or,  perhaps  we  had 
better  say,  three  men's  —  for  simply  being  a 
good  poet  is  about  as  nerve-consuming  an 
occupation  as  any  two  ordinary  men  could 
support  in  common  —  and  the  third  would 
have  to  run  to  fires  for  the  first  two. 

It  is  natural  to  the  character  of  the  American 
business  man  to  declare  that  the  professional 
poet  has  no  reason  for  existence  qua  poet  un- 
less he  can  make  his  art  support  him.  But  let 
the  business  man  bear  in  mind  that  if  he  had 
the  power  to  enforce  such  a  condition,  he 
would  be  practically  annihilating  the  art.  For 
it  is  literally  true  that,  if  plays  were  excluded, 
it  would  take  not  even  a  five-foot  shelf  to 
contain  all  the  first-rate  poetry  which  was 
ever  written  by  poets  in  a  state  of  poetic  self- 
[  1C6  ] 


FOR   POETS 

support.  "  Could  a  man  live  by  it,"  the  author 
of  "The  Deserted  Village"  once  wrote  to 
Henry  Goldsmith,  "it  were  not  unpleasant 
employment  to  be  a  poet."  Alas,  the  fatal 
condition!  For  the  art  itself  has  almost  never 
fed  and  clothed  its  devotee  —  at  least  until 
his  best  creative  days  are  done  and  he  has 
become  a  "grand  old  man."  More  often  the 
poet  has  attained  not  even  this  reward. 
Wordsworth's  lines  on  Chatterton  have  a 
wider  application: 

"  What  treasure  found  he?  Chains  and  pains  and  sorrow — 
Yea,  all  the  wealth  those  noble  seekers  find 
Whose  footsteps  mark  the  music  of  mankind! 
'T  was  his  to  lend  a  life:  't  was  Man's  to  borrow: 
'T  was  his  to  make,  but  not  to  share,  the  morrow." 

Those  who  insist  upon  judging  the  art  of 
poetry  on  the  hard  American  "cash  basis" 
ought  to  be  prepared,  for  the  sake  of  consist- 
ency, to  apply  the  same  criterion  as  well  to 
colleges,  public  schools,  symphony  orchestras, 
institutions  for  scientific  research,  missions, 
settlements,  libraries,  and  all  other  unlucra- 
[  167  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

live  educational  enterprises.  With  inexora- 
ble logic  they  should  be  prepared  to  insist 
that  people  really  do  not  desire  or  need 
knowledge  or  any  sort  of  uplift  because  they 
are  not  prepared  to  pay  its  full  cost.  It  is 
precisely  this  sort  of  logic  which  would  treat 
the  Son  of  Man  if  He  should  appear  among 
us,  to  a  bench  in  Bryant  Park,  and  a  place  in 

the  bread-line,  and  send  the  mounted  police 
I 

to  ride  down  his  socialistic  meetings  in  Union 

Square.  No!  poetry  and  most  other  forms  of 
higher  education  have  always  had  to  be  sub- 
sidized —  and  probably  always  will.  When 

. 

/     wisely  subsidized,  however,  this  art  is  very 

likely  to  repay  its  support  in  princely  fashion. 
In  fact,  I  know  of  no  other  investment  to-day 
that  would  bid  fair  to  bring  us  hi  so  many 
thousand  per  cent,  of  return  as  a  small  fresh- 
air  fund  for  poets. 

We  Americans  are  rather  apt  to  complain 

of  the  comparatively  poor,  unoriginal  showing 

which  our  poets  have  as  yet  made  among 

those   of   other   civilized   nations.     We   are 

[  168  1 


FOR    POETS 

quietly  disgusted  that  only  two  of  all  our 
bards  have  ever  made  their  work  forcibly 
felt  in  Europe;  and  that  neither  Poe  nor  Whit- 
man has  ever  profoundly  influenced  the  great 
masses  of  his  own  people. 

Despite  our  splendid  inheritance,  our  richly 
mingled  blood,  our  incomparably  stimulating 
New  World  atmosphere,  why  has  our  poetry 
made  such  a  meager  showing  among  the 
nations?  The  chief  reason  is  obvious.  We 
have  been  unwilling  to  let  our  poets  live  while 
they  were  working  for  us.  True,  we  have  the 
reputation  of  being  an  open-handed,  even  an 
extravagantly  generous  folk.  But  thrifti- 
ness  in  small  things  often  goes  with  an  extrav- 
agant disposition,  much  as  manifestations  of 
piety  often  accompany  wickedness  like  flying 
buttresses  consciously  placed  outside  the  edi- 
fice. We  have  spent  millions  on  bronze  and 
marble  book-palaces  which  shall  house  the 
works  of  the  poets.  We  have  spent  more 
millions  on  universities  which  shall  teach  these 
works.  But  as  for  making  it  possible  for  our 
[  169  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

few  real  poets  to  produce  works,  and  com- 
pletely fulfill  their  priceless  functions,  we 
have  always  satisfied  ourselves  by  decreeing: 
"Let  there  be  a  sound  cash  basis." 

So  it  came  to  pass  that  when  the  first 
exuberant,  pioneer  energy-margin  of  our  race 
began  to  be  consumed  by  the  new  and  ab- 
normal type  of  city  life,  it  became  no  longer 
possible  for  the  poets  to  put  as  much  soul- 
sinew  as  theretofore  into  their  lines,  after 
they  had  toilfully  earned  the  luxury  of  trying 
to  be  our  idealistic  leaders.  For  often  their 
initial  efforts  consumed  their  less  than  pioneer 
vitality.  And  how  did  we  treat  them  from 
the  first?  In  the  old  days  we  set  Longfellow 
and  Lowell  at  one  of  the  most  exhausting  of 
professions  —  teaching.  We  made  Emerson 
do  one-night  lecture-stands  all  winter  long  in 
the  West — sometimes  for  five  dollars  a  lecture 
and  feed  for  his  horse.  We  made  Bryant  ruin 
a  gift  as  elemental  as  Wordsworth's,  in  journal- 
ism; Holmes,  visit  patients  at  all  hours  of  the 
day  and  night;  Poe,  take  to  newspaper  offices 
[  170  ] 


FOR    POETS 

and  drink.  We  made  Whitman  drive  nails, 
set  type  and  drudge  in  the  Indian  Bureau  in 
Washington,  from  which  he  was  dismissed  for 
writing  the  most  original  and  the  most  poetic  of 
American  books.  Later  he  was  rescued  from 
want  only  by  the  humiliation  of  a  public 
European  subscription.  Lanier  we  allowed  to 
waste  away  in  a  dingy  lawyer's  office,  then  kill 
himself  so  fast  by  teaching  and  writing  rail- 
way advertisements  and  playing  the  flute 
in  a  city  orchestra  that  he  was  forced  to  defer 
composing  "Sunrise"  until  too  weak  with 
fever  to  carry  his  hand  to  his  lips.  And  this 
was  eleven  years  after  that  brave  spirit's 
single  cry  of  reproach: 

"Why  can  we  poets  dream  us  beauty,  so, 
But  cannot  dream  us  bread?" 

With  Lanier  the  physical  exhaustion  in- 
cident to  the  modern  speeding-up  process 
began  to  be  more  apparent.  Edward  Rowland 
Sill  we  did  away  with  in  his  early  prime 
through  journalism  and  teaching.  We  curbed 
I  171  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

and  pinched  and  stunted  the  promising  art  of 
Richard  Watson  Gilder  by  piling  upon  him 
several  men's  editorial  work.  We  created  a 
poetic  resemblance  between  Arthur  Upson 
and  the  hero  of  "The  Divine  Fire"  by  em- 
ploying him  in  a  bookstore.  We  made  William 
Vaughn  Moody  teach  in  a  city  environ- 
ment utterly  hostile  to  his  poetry,  and  later 
set  the  hand  that  gave  us  "An  Ode  in  Time 
of  Hesitation"  to  the  building  of  popular 
melodrama.  These  are  only  a  tithe  of  the 
things  that  we  have  done  to  the  hardiest  of 
those  benefactors  of  ours: 

"The  poets,  who  on  earth  have  made  us  heirs 
Of  truth  and  pure  delight." 

It  is  not  pleasant  to  dwell  on  the  fate  of  those 
less  sturdy  ones  who  have  remained  mute, 
inglorious  Miltons  for  lack  of  a  little  practical 
appreciation  and]  a  small  part  of  a  small 
fresh-air  fund. 

So  far  as  I  know,  Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich  is 
the  only  prominent  figure  among  the  poets 
[  172  ] 


FOR    POETS 

of  our  elder  generations  who  was  given  the 
means  of  devoting  himself  entirely  to  his  art. 
And  even  his  fortune  was  not  left  to  him  by 
his  practical,  poetry-loving  friend  until  so 
late  in  the  day  that  his  creative  powers  had 
already  begun  to  decline  through  age  and 
over-much  magazine  editing. 

More  than  almost  any  other  civilized  nation 
we  have  earned  Allen  Upward's  reproach  in 
"The  New  Word": 

There  are  two  kinds  of  human  outcasts.  Man, 
in  his  march  upward  out  of  the  deep  into  the  light, 
throws  out  a  vanguard  and  a  rearguard,  and  both 
are  out  of  step  with  the  main  body.  Humanity 
condemns  equally  those  who  are  too  good  for  it, 
and  those  who  are  too  bad.  On  its  Procrustean 
bed  the  stunted  members  of  the  race  are  racked; 
the  giants  are  cut  down.  It  puts  to  death  with 
the  same  ruthless  equality  the  prophet  and  the 
atavist.  The  poet  and  the  drunkard  starve  side 
by  side.  .  .  .  Literature  is  the  chief  ornament  of 
humanity;  and  perhaps  humanity  never  shows  it- 
self uglier  than  when  it  stands  with  the  pearl  shin- 
ing on  its  forehead,  and  the  pearl-maker  crushed 
beneath  its  heel.  .  .  .  England  will  always  have 
fifteen  thousand  a  j  year  for  some  respectable 
clergyman;  she  will  never  have  it  for  Shelley. 

[  173  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

Yes,  but  how  incomparably  better  England 
has  treated  her  poets  than  America  has 
treated  hers!  What  convenient  little  plums, 
as  De  Quincey  somewhat  wistfully  remarked, 
were  always  being  found  for  Wordsworth 
just  at  the  psychological  moment;  and  they 
were  not  withheld,  moreover,  until  he  was 
full  of  years  and  honors.  Indeed,  we  owe 
this  poet  to  the  poet-by-proxy  of  whom 
Wordsworth  wrote,  in  "The  Prelude": 

"He  deemed  that  my  pursuits  and  labours,  lay 
Apart  from  all  that  leads  to  wealth,  or  even 
A  necessary  maintenance  insures 
Without  some  hazard  to  the  finer  sense." 

How  tenderly  the  frail  bodies  of  Coleridge 
and  of  Francis  Thompson  were  cared  for  by 
their  appreciators.  How  potently  the  Civil 
List  and  the  laureateship  have  helped  a  long, 
if  most  uneven,  line  of  England's  singers. 
Over  against  our  solitary  ageing  Aldrich,  how 
many  great  English  poets  like  Byron,  Keats, 
the  Brownings,  Tennyson,  and  Swinburne 
have  found'  themselves  with  small  but  inde- 
[  174  ] 


FOR    POETS 

pendent  incomes,  free  to  give  their  whole 
unembarrassed  souls  and  all  that  in  them  was 
to  their  art.  And  all  this  since  the  close  of 
the  age  of  patronage! 

Why  have  we  never  had  a  Wordsworth,  or 
a  Browning?  For  one  thing,  because  this 
nation  of  philanthropists  has  been  too  thought- 
less to  found  the  small  fellowship  in  creative 
poetry  which  might  have  freed  a  Wordsworth 
of  ours  from  communion  with  a  cash-book  to 
wander  chanting  his  new-born  lines  among 
the  dreamy  Adirondack  lakes  or  the  frowning 
Sierras;  or  that  might  have  sought  out  our 
Browning  in  his  grocery  store  and  built 
him  a  modest  retreat  among  the  Thousand 
Islands.  If  not  too  thoughtless  to  act  thus, 
we  have  been  too  timid.  We  have  been  too 
much  afraid  of  encouraging  weaklings  by 
mistake.  We  have  been,  in  fact,  more  afraid 
of  encouraging  a  single  mediocre  poet  than  of 
neglecting  a  score  of  Shelleys.  But  we  should 
remember  that  even  if  the  weak  are  encour- 
aged with  the  strong,  no  harm  is  done. 
[  175  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

It  can  not  be  too  strongly  insisted  upon  that 
the  poor  and  mediocre  verse  which  has  always 
been  produced  by  every  age  is  practically 
innocuous.  It  hurts  only  the  publishers  who 
are  constantly  being  importuned  to  print  the 
stuff,  and  the  distinguished  men  and  women 
who  are  burdened  with  presentation  copies 
or  requests  for  criticism.  These  unfortunates 
all  happen  to  be  capable  of  emitting  loud  and 
authoritative  cries  of  distress  about  the  men- 
ace of  bad  poets.  But  we  should  discount 
these  cries  one  hundred  per  cent.  For  nobody 
else  is  hurt  by  the  bad  poets,  because  nobody 
else  pays  the  slightest  attention  to  them. 
Time  and  their  own  "inherent  perishable- 
ness"  soon  remove  all  traces  of  the  poetasters. 
It  were  better  to  help  hundreds  of  them  than 
to  risk  the  loss  of  one  new  Shelley.  And  do 
we  realize  how  many  Shelleys  we  may  actually 
have  lost  already?  I  think  it  possible  that  we 
may  have  had  more  than  one  such  potential 
singer  to  whom  we  never  allowed  any  leisure 
or  sympathy  or  margin  of  vitality  to  turn  into 
[  176  ] 


FOR    POETS 

poetry.  Perhaps  there  is  more  grim  truth 
than  humor  in  Mark  Twain's  vision  of  heaven 
where  Captain  Stormfield  saw  a  poet  as  great 
as  Shakespeare  who  hailed,  I  think,  from  Ten- 
nessee. The  reason  why  the  world  had  never 
heard  of  him  was  that  his  neighbors  in  Ten- 
nessee had  regarded  him  as  eccentric  and  had 
ridden  him  out  of  town  on  a  rail  and  assisted 
his  departure  to  a  more  congenial  clime  above. 

We  complain  that  we  have  had  no  poet  to 
rank  with  England's  greatest.  I  fear  that  it 
would  have  been  useless  for  us  to  have  had 
such  a  person.  We  probably  would  not  have 
known  what  to  do  with  him. 

I  realize  that  mine  is  not  the  popular  side 
of  this  question  and  that  an  occasional  poet 
with  an  income  may  be  found  who  will  even 
argue  against  giving  incomes  to  other  poets. 
Mr.  Aldrich,  for  instance,  wrote,  after  com- 
ing into  his  inheritance: 

"A  man  should  live  in  a  garret  aloof, 

And  have  few  friends,  and  go  poorly  clad, 
With  an  old  hat  stopping  the  chink  hi  the  roof, 
To  keep  the  goddess  constant  and  glad." 

[  177  1 


THE   JOYFUL  HEART 

But  a  friend  of  Mr.  Aldrich's,  one  of  his 
poetic  peers,  has  assured  me  that  it  was  not 
the  poet's  freedom  from  financial  cares  at 
all,  but  premature  age,  instead,  that  made 
his  goddess  of  poesy  fickle  after  the  advent 
of  the  pitifully  belated  fortune.  Mr.  Stedman 
spoke  a  far  truer  word  on  this  subject. 
"Poets,"  he  said,  "in  spite  of  the  proverb, 
sing  best  when  fed  by  wage  or  inheritance." 
"  'T  is  the  convinced  belief  of  mankind," 
wrote  Francis  Thompson  with  a  sardonic 
smile,  "that  to  make  a  poet  sing  you  must 
pinch  his  belly,  as  if  the  Almighty  had  con- 
structed him  like  certain  rudimentarily  vocal 
dolls."  "No  artist,"  declares  Arnold  Bennett, 
"was  ever  assisted  in  his  career  by  the  yoke, 
by  servitude,  by  enforced  monotony,  by 
economic  inferiority."  And  Bliss  Carman 
speaks  out  loud  and  bold:  "The  best  poets 
who  have  come  to  maturity  have  always  had 
some  means  of  livelihood  at  their  command. 
The  idea  that  any  sort  of  artist  or  workman 
is  all  the  better  for  being  doomed  to  a  life  of 
[  178  1 


FOR    POETS 

penurious  worry,  is  such  a  silly  old  fallacy, 
one  wonders  it  could  have  persisted  so  long." 
The  wolf  may  be  splendid  at  suckling  journal- 
ism and  various  other  less  inspired  sorts  of 
writing,  but  she  is  a  ferocious  old  stepmother 
to  poetry. 

There  are  some  who  snatch  eagerly  at  any 
argument  in  support  of  the  existing  order, 
and  who  triumphantly  point  out  the  number 
of  good  poems  that  have  been  written  under 
"seemingly"  adverse  conditions.  But  they  do 
not  stop  to  consider  how  much  better  these  po- 
ems might  have  been  made  under  "seemingly" 
favorable  conditions.  Percy  Mackaye  is  right 
in  declaring  that  the  few  singers  left  to  English 
poetry  after  our  "wholesale  driving-out  and 
killing-out  of  poets  .  .  .  are  of  two  sorts: 
those  with  incomes  and  those  without. 
Among  the  former  are  found  most  of  the  ex- 
cellent names  in  English  poetry,  a  fact  which 
is  hardly  a  compliment  to  our  civilization." 

Would  that  one  of  those  excellent  philan- 
thropists who  has  grown  so  accustomed  to 
[  179  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

giving  a  million  to  libraries  and  universities 
that  the  act  has  become  slightly  mechanical 
—  might  realize  that  he  has,  with  all  his 
generosity,  made  no  provision  as  yet  for  help- 
ing one  of  the  most  indispensable  of  all  edu- 
cational institutions  —  the  poet.  Would  that 
he  might  realize  how  little  good  the  poet  of 
genius  can  derive  from  the  universities  — 
places  whose  conservative  formalism  is  even 
dangerous  to  his  originality,  because  they 
try  to  melt  him  along  with  all  the  other 
students  and  pour  him  into  their  one  mold. 
It  is  distressing  to  think  of  all  the  sums  now 
devoted  to  inducing  callow,  overdriven  sopho- 
mores to  compose  forced  essays  and  doggerel, 
by  luring  them  on  with  the  glitter  of  cash 
prizes.  One  shudders  to  think  of  all  the  fellow- 
ship money  which  is  now  being  used  to  finance 
reluctant  young  dry-as-dusts  while  they  are 
preparing  to  pack  still  tighter  the  already 
overcrowded  ranks  of  "professors  of  English 
literature"  —  whose  profession,  as  Gerald 
Stanley  Lee  justly  remarks,  is  founded  on  the 
[  180  ] 


FOR    POETS 

striking  principle  that  a  very  great  book  can 
be  taught  by  a  very  little  man.  This  is  a 
department  of  human  effort  which,  as  now 
usually  conducted,  succeeds  in  destroying 
much  budding  appreciation  of  poetry.  Why 
endow  these  would-be  interpreters  of  poetry, 
to  the  neglect  of  the  class  of  artists  whose 
work  they  profess  to  interpret?  What  should 
we  think  of  England  if  her  Victorian  poets 
had  all  happened  to  be  penniless,  and  she  had 
packed  them  off  to  Grub  Street  and  invested, 
instead,  in  a  few  more  professors  of  Victorian 
literature? 

Why  should  not  a  few  thousands  out  of  the 
millions  we  spend  on  education  be  used  to 
found  fellowships  of  creative  poetry?  These 
would  not  be  given  at  first  to  those  who  wish 
to  learn  to  write  poetry;  for  the  first  thousands 
would  be  far  too  precious  for  use  in  any  such 
wild-cat  speculations.  They  would  be  de- 
voted, rather,  to  poets  of  proved  quality,  who 
have  already,  somehow,  learned  their  art, 
and  who  ask  no  more  wondrous  boon  from 
[  181  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

life  than  fresh  air  and  time  to  regain  and  keep 
that  necessary  margin  of  vitality  which  must 
go  to  the  making  of  genuine  poetry. 

I  would  not  have  the  incumbent  of  such  a 
fellowship,  however,  deprived  suddenly  of  all 
outer  incentives  for  effort.  The  abrupt  tran- 
sition from  constant  worry  and  war  among 
his  members  to  an  absolutely  unclouded  life 
of  pure  vocation-following  might  be  almost  too 
violent  a  shock,  and  unsettle  him  and  injure 
his  productivity  for  a  time. 

The  award  of  such  a  fellowship  must  not, 
of  course,  involve  the  least  hint  of  charity 
or  coercion.  It  should  be  offered  and  ac- 
cepted as  an  honor,  not  as  a  donation.  The 
yearly  income  should,  in  my  opinion,  be  small. 
It  should  be  such  a  sum  as  would  almost,  but 
not  quite,  support  the  incumbent  very  simply 
in  the  country,  and  still  allow  for  books  and 
an  occasional  trip  to  town.  In  some  cases  an 
income  of  a  thousand  dollars,  supplemented  by 
the  little  that  poetry  earns  and  possibly  by 
a  random  article  or  story  in  the  magazines, 
[  182  ] 


FOR    POETS 

would  enable  a  poet  to  lead  a  life  of  the  largest 
effectiveness. 

It  is  my  belief  that  almost  any  genuine 
poet  who  is  now  kept  in  the  whirl  by  economic 
reasons  and  thus  debarred  from  the  free  prac- 
tice of  his  calling  would  gladly  relinquish 
even  a  large  salary  and  reduce  his  life  to  sun- 
pie  terms  to  gam  the  inestimable  privilege 
of  devoting  himself  wholly  to  his  art  before 
the  golden  bowl  is  broken.  Many  of  those 
who  are  in  intimate  touch  with  the  poets  of 
America  to-day  could  show  any  philanthro- 
pist how  to  do  his  land  and  the  world  more 
actual,  visible,  immediate  good  by  devoting 
a  thousand  dollars  to  poetry,  than  by  allow- 
ing an  hundred  times  that  sum  to  slip  into  the 
ordinary  well-worn  grooves  of  philanthropy. 

Some  years  ago  a  questionnaire  was  sub- 
mitted to  various  literary  men  by  a  poetry- 
lover  who  hoped  to  induce  a  wealthy  friend 
to  subsidize  poets  of  promise  in  case  these 
literary  leaders  approved  the  plan.  While  the 
younger  writers  warmly  favored  the  idea,  a 
[  183  1 


THE   JOYFUL   HEART 

few  of  the  older  ones  discouraged  it.  These 
were,  in  all  cases,  men  who  had  made  a 
financial  success  in  more  lucrative  branches  of 
literature  than  poetry;  and  it  was  natural  for 
the  veterans,  who  had  brawnily  struggled 
through  the  burden  and  heat  of  the  day,  to 
look  with  the  unsympathetic  eye  of  the  sturdy 
upon  those  frailer  ones  of  the  rising  generation 
who  perhaps  might,  without  assistance,  be 
eliminated  in  the  rough-and-tumble  of  the 
literary  market-place.  Of  course  it  was  but 
human  for  the  veterans  to  insist  that  any 
real  genius  among  their  youthful  competitors 
"would  out,"  and  that  any  assistance  would 
but  make  life  too  soft  for  the  youngsters, 
and  go  to  swell  the  growing  "menace"  of 
bad  verse  by  mitigating  the  primal  rigors 
of  natural  selection.  No  doubt  the  genera- 
tion of  writers  older  than  Wordsworth  quite 
innocently  uttered  these  very  same  senti- 
ments in  voices  of  deep  authority  when  it 
was  proposed  to  offer  this  young  person  a 
chance  to  compose  in  peace.  No.  One  fears 
[  184  1 


FOR    POETS 

that  the  attitude  of  these  veterans  was  not 
wholly  judicial.  But  then,  why  should  any 
haphazard  group  of  creative  artists  be 
expected  to  be  judicial,  anyway?  One 
might  as  reasonably  go  to  the  Louvre  for 
classes  in  conic  sections,  or  to  the  Garden 
of  the  Gods  for  instruction  in  Rabbinical 
theology. 

Few  supporters  of  the  general  plan,  on  the 
other  hand,  were  wholly  in  favor  of  all  the 
measures  proposed  for  carrying  it  out.  Some 
of  the  most  telling  criticisms  went  to  show 
that  while  poets  of  undoubted  ability  ought 
to  be  helped,  the  method  of  their  selection 
offers  a  grave  difficulty.  H.  G.  Wells,  who 
heartily  approved  the  mam  idea,  brought 
out  the  fact  that  it  would  never  do  to  leave 
the  choice  to  a  jury,  as  no  jury  would  ever 
have  voted  for  half  of  the  great  poets  who 
have  perished  miserably.  Juries  are  much 
too  conventionally  minded.  For  they  are 
public  functionaries;  or,  if  not  that,  at  least 
they  feel  self-consciously  as  if  they  were  going 
[  185  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

to  be  held  publicly  responsible,  and  are  apt 
to  bring  extremely  conventional,  and  perhaps 
priggish,  standards  to  bear  upon  their  choice. 
"They  invariably  become  timid  and  narrow," 
wrote  Mr.  Wells,  "and  seek  refuge  in  practical, 
academic,  and  moral  tests  that  invariably 
exclude  the  real  men  of  genius." 

Prizes  and  competitions  were  considered 
equally  ill-advised  methods  of  selection.  It 
is  significant  that  these  methods  are  now  being 
rapidly  dropped  in  the  fields  of  sculpture  and 
architecture.  For  the  mere  thought  of  a 
competition  is  a  thing  essentially  antagonistic 
to  the  creative  impulse;  and  talent  is  likely 
to  acquit  itself  better  than  genius  in  such  a 
struggle.  The  idea  of  a  poetic  competition  is 
a  relic  of  a  pioneer  mode  of  thought.  Mr. 
Wells  concluded  that  the  decision  should  be 
made  by  the  individual.  But  I  cannot  agree 
with  him  that  that  same  individual  should 
be  the  donor  of  the  fellowship.  It  seems  to 
me  that  this  would-be  savior  of  our  American 
poetry  should  select  the  best  judge  of  poets 
r  186  ] 


FOR    POETS 

and  poetry  that  he  can  discover  and  be  guided 
by  his  advice. 

On  general  principles,  there  are  several 
things  that  this  judge  should  not  be.  He  should 
not  be  a  professor  of  English,  because  of  the 
professor's  usual  bias  toward  the  academic. 
Besides,  these  fellowships  ought  not  hi  any 
way  to  be  associated  with  institutions  of 
learning  —  places  which  are  apt  to  fetter 
poets  and  surround  them  with  an  atmosphere 
hostile  to  the  creative  impulse.  Neither 
should  this  momentous  decision  be  left  to 
editors  or  publishers,  because  they  are  usually 
suffering  from  literary  indigestion  caused  by 
skimming  too  many  manuscripts  too  fast, 
and  because,  at  any  rate,  they  ordinarily  pay 
little  attention  to  poetry  and  hold  it  com- 
mercially "in  one  grand  despise."  Nor  should 
the  normal  type  of  poet  be  chosen  as  judge 
to  decide  this  question.  For  the  poet  is  apt 
to  have  a  narrow,  one-sided  view  of  the  field. 
He  has  probably  developed  his  own  distinc- 
tive style  and  personality  at  the  expense  of 
[  137  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

artistic  catholicity  and  kindly  breadth  of 
critical  judgment.  The  creative  and  the 
critical  faculties  are  usually  as  distinct  and 
as  mutually  exclusive  spheres  as  that  of  the 
impassioned,  partisan  lawyer* and  the  cool, 
impartial  judge. 

To  whom,  then,  should  the  decision  be 
left?  It  should,  in  my  opinion,  be  left  to 
a  real  judge  —  to  some  broad,  keen  critic  of 
poetry  with  a  clear,  unbiased  contemporary 
view  of  the  whole  domain  of  the  art.  It 
matters  not  whether  he  is  professional  or 
amateur,  so  he  is  untouched  by  academicism 
and  has  not  done  so  much  reading  or  writing 
as  to  impair  his  mental  digestion  and  his 
clarity  of  vision.  Care,  of  course,  would  have 
to  be  used  in  safeguarding  the  critic-judge 
against  undue  pressure  in  favor  of  this  candi- 
date or  that;  and  in  safeguarding  the  incum- 
bent of  the  fellowship  from  yet  more  insidious 
influences.  For  the  apparently  liberated  poet 
would  merely  have  exchanged  prisons  if  he 
learned  that  the  founder  of  the  fellowship 
[  188  1 


FOR    POETS 

wished  to  dictate  what  sort  of  poetry  he 
should  write. 

The  idea  of  poetry  fellowships  is  not  as 
novel  as  it  perhaps  may  sound.  It  is  no  mere 
empirical  theory.  Americans  ought  to  be 
proud  to  know  that,  in  a  modest  way,  it  has 
recently  been  tried  here,  and  is  proving  a 
success.  I  am  told  that  already  two  masters 
of  poetry  have  been  presented  to  us  as  free 
workers  in  their  art  by  two  Boston  philan- 
thropists, and  have  been  enabled  to  accom- 
plish some  of  their  best  work  through  such 
fellowships  as  are  here  advocated.  This 
fact  should  put  cities  like  New  York,  Pitts- 
burg,  and  Chicago  on  their  mettle.  For  they 
must  realize  that  Boston,  with  her  quiet,  slow- 
moving,  Old- World  pace,  has  not  done  to 
poetry  a  tithe  of  the  harm  that  her  more 
energetic  neighbors  have,  and  should  there- 
fore not  be  suffered  to  bear  the  entire  brunt 
of  the  expiation. 

Men  say  that  money  cannot  buy  a  joyful 
heart.  But  next  to  writing  a  great  poem,  I 
[  189  1 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

can  scarcely  imagine  a  greater  happiness  than 
to  know  that  a  thousand  of  my  dollars  had 
enabled  an  imprisoned  genius  to  shake  from 
his  shoes  the  dust  of  a  city  office  and  go  for 
a  year  to  "God's  outdoors,"  there  to  free  his 
system  of  some  of  the  beauty  that  had 
chokingly  accumulated  there  until  it  had 
grown  an  almost  intolerable  pain.  What  joy 
to  know  that  my  fellowship  had  given  men  the 
modern  New  World  "Hyperion,"  or  "Pre- 
lude," or  "Ring  and  the  Book"!  And  even 
if  that  whole  year  resulted  in  nothing  more 
than  a  "Skylark,"  or  a  "Rabbi  Ben  Ezra," 
or  a  "Crossing  the  Bar"  —  could  one  possi- 
bly consider  such  a  result  in  the  same  thought- 
wave  with  dollars  and  cents? 

But  this  thousand  dollars  might  do  some- 
thing even  better  than  help  produce  counter- 
parts of  famous  poems  created  in  other  times 
and  lands.  It  might  actually  secure  the  in- 
estimable boon  of  a  year's  leisure,  a  procession 
of  peaceful  vistas,  and  a  brimming  cup  for 
one  of  that  "new  brood"  of  "poets  to  come" 
[  190  ] 


FOR    POETS 

which  Walt  Whitman  so  confidently  counted 
upon  to  'justify  him  and  answer  what  he 
was  for.'  This  handful  of  gold  might  make 
it  possible  for  one  of  these  new  poets  to  come 
into  his  own,  and  ours,  at  once,  and  in  his 
own  person  accomplish  that  fusion,  so  de- 
voutly to  be  wished,  of  those  diverse  factors  of 
the  greatest  poetry  which  have  existed  among 
us  thus  far  only  in  awful  isolation — the  posses- 
sion of  this  one  and  that  of  our  chief  singers. 

How  fervently  we  poetry-lovers  wish  that 
one  of  the  captains  of  industry  would  feel 
impelled  to  put  his  hand  into  his  pocket  — 
if  only  into  his  watch-pocket  —  or  adorn  his 
last  testament  with  a  modest  codicil!  It 
would  b«j  such  poetic  justice  if  one  of  those 
who  have  prospered  through  the  very  speed- 
ing-up process  which  has  so  seriously  crippled 
our  poetry,  should  devote  to  its  service  a 
small  tithe  of  what  he  has  won  from  poetry's 
loss  —  and  thus  hasten  our  renaissance  of 
singers,  and  bring  a  new  dawn,  'brighter  than 
before  known,'  out  of  the  dusk  of  the  poets. 


IX 

THE   JOYOUS  MISSION   OF  MECHANICAL 
MUSIC 

« 

I  WONDER  if  any  other  invention  has 
ever,  in  such  a  brief  time,  made  so  many 
joyful  hearts  as  the  invention  of  mechanical 
music.  It  has  brought  light,  peace,  gladness, 
and  the  gift  of  self-expression  to  every  third 
or  fourth  flat,  villa,  and  lonely  farmhouse  in 
the  land.  Its  voice  has  literally  gone  out 
through  all  the  earth,  and  with  a  swiftness 
more  like  that  of  light  than  of  sound. 

Only  yesterday  we  were  marveling  at  the 
discovery  of  the  larger  magazine  audience. 
Until  then  we  had  never  dreamed  of  address- 
ing millions  of  fellow  creatures  at  one  tune, 
as  the  popular  magazine  now  does.  Imagine 
the  astonished  delight  of  Plato  or  Cervantes, 
Poe  or  Dickens,  if  they  had  been  given  in 
one  week  an  audience  equivalent  in  number 
[  192  ] 


MISSION    OF    MUSIC 

to  five  thousand  readers  a  year  for  ten  cen- 
turies! Dickens  would  have  called  it,  I 
think,  "immortality-while-you-wait."  Yet 
this  sort  of  immortality  was  recently  placed 
at  the  immediate  disposal  of  the  ordinary 
writer. 

The  miracle  was  unique  in  history.  But  it 
did  not  long  remain  so.  Not  content  with 
raining  this  wonder  upon  us,  history  at  once 
poured  down  a  greater.  One  morning  we 
awoke  to  find  a  new  and  still  vaster  medium 
of  expression,  a  medium  whose  globe-girdling 
voice  was  to  that  of  the  five-million  reader 
magazine  as  the  roar  of  Niagara  to  the  roar 
of  a  Philadelphia  trolley-car.  To-day,  from 
wherever  civilized  man  has  obtained  even 
a  temporary  foothold,  there  arise  without 
ceasing  the  accents  of  mechanical  music, 
which  talk  persuasively  to  all  in  a  language  so 
universal  that  even  the  beasts  understand  it 
and  cock  applauding  ears  at  the  sound  of  the 
master  voice.  So  that,  while  the  magazine 
writers  now  address  the  million,  the  composers 
[  193  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

and  singers  and  players  make  their  bows  to 
the  billion. 

Their  omnipresence  is  astonishing.  They 
are  the  last  to  bid  you  farewell  when  you 
leave  civilization.  They  are  the  first  to  greet 
you  on  your  return.  When  I  canoed  across 
the  wild  Allagash  country,  I  was  sped  from 
Moosehead  Lake  by  Caruso,  received  with 
open  arms  at  the  halfway  house  by  the  great- 
hearted Plancon,  and  welcomed  to  Fort  Kent 
by  Sousa  and  his  merry  men.  With  Schu- 
mann-Heinck,  Melba,  and  Tetrazzini  I  once 
camped  hi  the  heart  of  the  Sierras.  When  I 
persisted  to  the  uttermost  secret  corner  of 
the  Dolomites,  I  found  myself  anticipated  by 
Kreisler  and  his  fiddle.  They  tell  me  that 
the  portly  Victor  Herbert  has  even  penetrated 
with  his  daring  orchestra  through  darkest 
Africa  and  gone  on  to  arrange  a  special  bene- 
fit, in  his  home  town,  for  the  dalai-lama  of 
Tibet. 

One  of  the  most  promising  things  about 
mechanical  music  is  this:  No  matter  what 
[  194  ] 


MISSION    OF    MUSIC 

kind  of  music  or  quality  of  performance  it 
offers  you,  you  presently  long  for  something 
a  little  better  —  unless  your  development 
has  been  arrested.  It  makes  small  difference 
in  this  respect  which  one  of  the  three  main 
varieties  of  instrument  you  happen  to  own. 
It  may  be  the  phonograph.  It  may  be  the 
kind  of  automatic  piano  which  accurately 
reproduces  the  performances  of  the  master 
pianists.  It  may  be  the  piano-player  which 
indulgently  supplies  you  with  technic  ready- 
made,  and  allows  you  to  throw  your  own  soul 
into  the  music,  whether  you  have  ever  taken 
lessons  or  not.  Or  it  may  be  a  combination 
of  the  last  two.  The  influence  of  these 
machines  is  progressive.  It  stands  for  evolu- 
tion rather  than  for  devolution  or  revolution. 
Often,  however,  the  evolution  seems  to 
progress  by  sheer  accident.  This  is  the  way 
the  accident  is  likely  to  happen.  Jones  is 
buying  records  for  the  family  phonograph. 
One  may  judge  of  his  particular  stage  of 
musical  evolution  by  his  purchases,  which 
[  195  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

are:  "Meet  me  in  St.  Louis,  Louis,"  "Dance 
of  the  Honey  Bells,"  "Hello  Central,  Give  me 
Heaven,"  "Fashion  Plate  March,"  and  "I 
Know  that]  I'll  be  Happy  when  I  Die."  He 
also  notices  in  the  catalogue  a  piece  called 
"Tannhauser  March,"  and,  after  some  hesita- 
tion, buys  this  as  well,  because  the  name 
sounds  so  much  like  his  favorite  brand  of 
beer  that  he  suspects  it  to  be  music  of  a  con- 
vivial nature  —  a  medley  of  drinking-songs, 
perhaps. 

But  that  evening  in  the  parlor  it  does  not 
seem  much  like  beer.  When  the  Mephisto 
Military  Band  strikes  it  up  —  far  from  seem- 
ing in  the  least  alcoholic,  it  exhilarates  nobody. 
So  Jones  inters  it  in  the  darkest  corner  of 
the  music-cabinet.  And  the  family  devote 
themselves  to  the  cake-walks  and  comic 
medleys,  the  fandangoes  and  tangos,  the 
xylophone  solos,  the  shakedowns  and  break- 
downs and  the  rags  and  tatters  of  their  col- 
lection until  they  have  thoroughly  exhausted 
the  delights  thereof.  Then,  having  had  time 
[  196  1 


MISSION    OF    MUSIC 

to  forget  somewhat  the  flatness  of  "Tann- 
hauser,"  and  for  want  of  anything  better  to 
do,  they  take  out  the  despised  record,  dust  it, 
and  insert  it  into  the  machine.  But  this 
time,  curiously  enough,  the  thing  does  not 
sound  quite  so  flat.  After  repeated  playings, 
it  even  begins  to  rival  the  "Fashion  Plate 
March"  in  its  appeal.  And  it  keeps  on  grow- 
ing in  grace  until  within  a  year  the  "Fashion 
Plate  March"  is  as  obsolete  as  fashion  plates 
have  a  habit  of  growing  within  a  year,  while 
"Tannhauser"  has  won  the  distinction  of 
being  the  best-wearing  record  in  the  cabinet. 
Then  it  begins  to  occur  to  the  Jones  family 
that  there  must  be  two  kinds  of  musical  food: 
candy  and  staples.  Candy,  like  the  "Fashion 
Plate  March,"  tastes  wonderfully  sweet  to 
the  unsophisticated  palate  as  it  goes  down; 
but  it  is  easy  to  take  too  much.  And  the  , 
cheaper  the  candy,  the  swifter  the  consequent 
revulsion  of  feeling.  As  for  the  staples,  there 
is  nothing  very  piquant  about  their  flavor; 
but  if  they  are  of  first  quality,  and  if  one 
[  197  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

keeps  his  appetite  healthy,  one  seems  to  enjoy 
them  more  and  more  and  to  thrive  on  them 
three  times  a  day. 

Accordingly,  Jones  is  commissioned,  when 
next  he  visits  the  music-store,  to  get  a  few 
more  records  like  "Tannhauser."  On  this 
occasion,  he  may  even  be  rash  enough  to 
experiment  with  a  Schubert  march,  or  a 
Weber  overture,  or  one  of  the  more  popular 
movements  of  a  Beethoven  sonata.  And  so 
the  train  of  evolution  will  rush  onward,  bear- 
ing the  Joneses  with  it  until  fashion-plate 
marches  are  things  of  the  misty,  backward 
horizon,  and  the  family  has,  by  little  and 
little,  come  to  know  and  love  the  whole 
blessed  field  of  classical  music.  And  they 
have  found  that  the  word  "classical"  is  not  a 
synonym  for  dry-rot,  but  that  it  simply 
means  the  music  that  wears  best. 

However  the  glorious  mistake  may  occur, 

it  is   being   made   by  someone   every  hour. 

By   such   hooks   and  crooks   as  these,  good 

music  is  finding  its  way  into  more  and  more 

[  198  ] 


MISSION    OF    MUSIC 

homes.  Although  its  true  "classical"  nature 
is  detected  at  the  first  trial,  it  is  not  thrown 
away,  because  it  cost  good  money.  It  is  put 
away  and  bides  its  time;  and  some  day  the 
surprising  fact  that  it  has  wearing  qualities 
is  bound  to  be  discovered.  To  those  who 
believe  hi  the  law  of  musical  evolution,  and 
who  realize  that  mechanical  music  has  reached 
the  wide  world,  and  is  even  beginning  to  pene- 
trate into  the  public  library,  the  possibility 
of  these  happy  accidents  means  a  sure  and 
swift  general  development  in  the  apprecia- 
tion of  the  best  music. 

Those  who  know  that  man's  musical  taste 
tends  to  grow  better  and  not  worse,  know 
also  that  any  music  is  better  than  no  music. 
A  mechanical  instrument  which  goes  is  better 
than  a  new  concert  grand  piano  that  remains 
shut. 

"Canned   music  may  not  be  the  highest 

form  of  art,"  the  enthusiast  will  say  with  a 

needless   air  of  half   apology,   half  defiance, 

"but  I  enjoy  it  no  end."    And  then  he  will 

[  199  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

go  on  to  tell  how  the  parlor  melodeon  had 
gathered  dust  for  years  until  it  was  given  in 
part  exchange  for  a  piano-player.  And  now 
the  thing  is  the  joy  of  the  family,  and  the  home 
is  filled  with  color  and  effervescence,  and  every 
one's  head  is  filled  with  at  least  a  rudiment 
of  living,  growing  musical  culture. 

The  fact  is,  the  piano-player  is  turning 
thousands  of  supposedly  humdrum,  prosaic 
people  into  musical  enthusiasts,  to  their  own 
immense  surprise.  Many  of  these  people  are 
actually  taking  lessons  in  the  subtle  art  of 
manipulating  the  machine.  They  are  spending 
more  money  than  they  can  afford  on  vast 
collections  of  rolls.  They  are  going  more 
and  more  to  every  important  concert  for 
hints  on  interpretation.  Better  still,  the  most 
musical  among  them  are  being  piqued,  by 
the  combined  merits  and  defects  of  the  ma- 
chine, into  learning  to  play  an  tmmechanical 
instrument  for  the  joy  of  feeling  less  mech- 
anism interposed  between  themselves  and 
"the  real  thing." 

[  200  ] 


MISSION    OF    MUSIC 

Machinery  has  already  done  as  much  for 
the  true  spirit  of  music  as  the  "safe  and  sane" 
movement  has  done  for  the  true  spirit  of  the 
Fourth  of  July.  Both  have  shifted  the  em- 
phasis from  brute  noise  and  fireworks  to  more 
spiritual  considerations.  The  piano-player 
has  done  a  great  deal  to  cheapen  the  glamour 
of  mere  technical  display  on  the  part  of  the 
virtuosi  and  to;  redeem  us  from  the  'thralldom 
of  the  school  of  Liszt.  Our  admiration  for 
musical  gymnastics  and  tight-rope  balancing 
is  now  leaking  away  so  fast  through  the  per- 
forations of  the  paper  rolls  that  the  kind  of 
display-piece  known  as  the  concerto  is  going 
out  of  fashion.  The  only  sort  of  concerto 
destined  to  keep  our  favor  is,  I  imagine,  that 
of  the  Schumann  or  Brahms  type,  which  de- 
pends for  its  effect  not  at  all  on  display,  but 
on  sound  musicianship  alone.  The  virtuoso 
is  destined  soon  to  leave  the  circus  business 
and  bid  a  long  farewell  to  his  late  colleagues, 
the  sword-swallower,  the  trapeze  artist,  the 
strong  man,  the  fat  lady,  the  contortionist, 
[  201  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

and  the  gentleman  who  conducts  the  shell- 
and-pea  game.  For  presently  the  only  thing 
that  will  be  able  to  entice  people  to  concerts 
will  be  the  soul  of  music.  Its  body  will  be  a 
perfectly  commonplace  affair. 

Many  a  good  musician  fears,  I  know, 
that  machine-made  music  will  not  stop  with 
annihilating  vulgar  display,  but  will  do  to 
death  all  professional  music  as  well.  This 
fear  is  groundless.  Mechanical  instruments 
will  no  more  drive  the  good  pianist  or  violinist 
or  'cellist  out  of  his  profession  than  the  public 
library,  as  many  once  feared,  will  drive  the 
bookseller  out  of  business.  For  the  library, 
after  persuading  people  to  read,  has  taught 
them  how  much  pleasure  may  be  had  from 
owning  a  book,  with  the  privilege  of  marking 
it  and  scribbling  one's  own  ideas  on  the 
margins,  and  not  having  to  rush  it  back  to 
headquarters  at  inopportune  moments  and 
pay  to  a  stern  young  woman  a  fine  of  eight 
cents.  Likewise  people  are  eventually  led 
to  realize  that  the  joy  of  passively  absorbing 
[  202  ] 


MISSION    OF    MUSIC 

the  product  of  phonograph  or  electric  piano 
contrasts  with  the  higher  joy  of  listening 
creatively  to  music  which  the  hearer  helps  to 
make,  in  the  same  way  that  borrowing  a  book 
of  Browning  contrasts  with  owning  a  book  of 
Browning.  I  believe  that,  just  as  the  libraries 
are  yearly  educating  hosts  of  book-buyers, 
so  mechanical  music  is  cooperating  with 
evolution  to  swell  the  noble  army  of  those 
who  support  concerts  and  give  private 
musicales. 

Of  course  there  is  no  denying  that  the  exist- 
ence of  music-making  machinery  has  a  certain 
relaxing  effect  on  some  of  the  less  talented 
followers  of  the  muse  of  strumming,  scraping, 
screeching,  and  blatting.  This  is  because  the 
soul  of  music  is  not  in  them.  And  in  striving 
to  reproduce  its  body,  they  perceive  how  hope- 
less it  is  to  compete  with  the  physical  perfec- 
tion of  the  manufactured  product.  In  like 
manner,  the  invention  of  canned  meats  doubt- 
less discouraged  many  minor  cooks  from  fur- 
ther struggles  with  their  craft.  But  these 
[  203  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

losses,  I,  for  one,  cannot  bring  myself  to 
mourn. 

What  seems  a  sounder  complaint  is  that  the 
phonograph,  because  it  reproduces  with  equal 
readiness  music  and  the  spoken  word,  may 
become  an  effective  instrument  of  satire  in 
the  hands  of  the  clever  philistine.  Let  me 
illustrate.  To  the  Jones  collection  of  records, 
shortly  after  "Tannhauser"  began  to  win  its 
way,  there  was  added  a  reactionary  "comic" 
record  entitled  "Maggie  Clancy's  New 
Piano."  In  the  record  Maggie  begins  play- 
ing "Tannha'user"  very  creditably  on  her 
new  instrument.  Presently  the  voice  of  old 
Clancy  is  heard  from  another  room  calling, 
"Maggie!"  The  music  goes  on.  There  is  a 
crescendo  series  of  calls.  The  piano  stops. 

"Yes,  Father?" 

"Maggie,  is  the  new  pianny  broke?" 

"No,  Father;  I  was  merely  playing  Wag- 


ner." 


Old  Clancy  meditates  a  moment;  then,  with 
a  gentleness  of  touch  that  might  turn  a  New 
[  204  ] 


MISSION    OF    MUSIC 

York  music  critic  green  with  envy,  he  replies: 
"Oh,  I  thought  ye  wuz  shovelin'  coal  in  the 
parlor  stove." 

Records  like  these  have  power  to  retard  and 
roughen  the  otherwise  smooth  course  of  a 
family's  musical  evolution;  but  they  are 
usually  unable  to  arrest  it.  In  general  I 
think  that  such  satires  may  fortify  the  elder 
generation  in  its  conservative  mistrust  of 
classical  music.  But  if  they  are  only  heard 
often  enough  by  the  young,  I  believe  that  the 
sympathies  of  the  latter  will  end  in  chiming 
with  the  taste  of  the  enlightened  Maggie 
rather  than  with  that  of  her  father. 

Until  recently  a  graver  charge  against  the 
phonograph  has  been  that  it  was  so  much 
better  adapted  for  reproducing  song  than 
pure  instrumental  music  that  it  was  tending 
to  identify  the  art  of  music  in  the  minds  of 
most  men  with  song  alone.  This  tendency 
was  dangerous.  For  song  is  not  all  of  music, 
nor  even  its  most  important  part.  The  voice 
is  naturally  more  limited  in  range,  technic, 
[  205  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

and  variety  of  color  than  many  another  In- 
strument. And  it  is  artificially  handicapped 
by  the  rather  absurd  custom  which  forces 
the  singer  to  drag  in  poetry  (much  to  the 
latter's  disadvantage),  and  therewith  distract 
his  own  attention  and  that  of  his  audience 
from  the  music. 

The  fact  remains  that  one  art  at  a  time  is 
none  too  easy  for  even  the  most  perfect 
medium  of  expression  to  cope  with.  To 
make  a  somewhat  less  than  perfect  instru- 
ment like  the  human  voice,  cope  always  with 
two  simultaneously  is  an  indication  that  the 
young  art  of  music  has  not  yet  emerged  from 
its  teens.  This  is  one  reason  why  most  song 
is  as  yet  so  intrinsically  unmusical.  Its  reach 
is,  as  a  rule,  forced  to  exceed  its  grasp.  Also 
the  accident  of  having  a  fine  voice  usually 
determines  a  singer's  career,  though  a  perfect 
vocal  organ  does  not  necessarily  imply  a 
musical  nature.  The  best  voices,  in  fact, 
often  belong,  by  some  contrariety  of  fate,  to 
the  worst  musicians.  For  these  and  other 
[  206  ] 


MISSION    OF    MUSIC 

reasons,  there  is  less  of  the  true  spirit  of  music 
to  be  heard  from  vocal  cords  than  from  the 
cords  and  reeds  and  brazen  tubes  of  piano, 
organ,  string  quartet,  and  orchestra.  Thus, 
when  the  phonograph  threatened  to  identify 
song  with  music  in  general,  it  threatened  to 
give  the  art  a  setback  and  make  the  singer 
the  arch-enemy  of  the  wider  musical  culture. 
Fortunately  the  phonograph  now  gives  prom- 
ise of  averting  this  peril  by  bringing  up  its 
reproduction  of  absolute  music  near  to  its 
vocal  standard. 

Another  charge  against  most  machine-made 
music  is  its  unhuman  accuracy.  The  phono- 
graph companies  seldom  give  out  a  record 
which  is  not  practically  perfect  in  technic 
and  intonation.  As  for  the  mechanical  piano, 
there  is  no  escape  from  the  certainty  of  just 
what  notes  are  coming  next  —  that  is,  if  little 
Johnnie  has  not  been  editing  the  paper  record 
with  his  father's  leather-punch.  Therefore 
one  grows  after  a  while  to  long  for  a  few  of 
those  deviations  from  mathematical  precision 
[  207  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

which  imply  human  frailty  and  lovableness. 
One  reason  why  the  future  is  veiled  from  us 
is  that  it  is  so  painful  to  be  certain  that  one's 
every  prediction  is  coming  true. 

A  worse  trouble  with  the  phonograph  is 
that  it  seems  to  leave  out  of  account  that 
essential  part  of  every  true  musical  perform- 
ance, the  creative  listener.  A  great  many 
phonograph  records  sound  as  though  the 
recorder  had  been  performing  to  an  audience 
no  more  spiritually  resonant  than  the  four 
walls  of  a  factory.  I  think  that  the  makers  of 
another  kind  of  mechanical  instrument  must 
have  realized  this  oversight  on  the  part  of 
the  phonograph  manufacturer.  I  mean  the 
sort  of  electric  piano  which  faithfully  repro- 
duces every  nuance  of  the  master  pianists. 
Many  of  the  records  of  this  marvelous  in- 
strument sound  as  though  the  recording-room 
of  the  factory  had  been  "papered5*  with 
creative  listeners  who  cooperated  mightily 
with'  the  master  on  the  stage.  Would  that 
the  phonographers  might  take  the  hint! 
[  208  ] 


MISSION    OF    MUSIC 

But  no  matter  how  effectively  the  creative 
listener  originally  cooperates  with  the  maker 
of  this  kind  of  record,  the  electric  piano 
does  not  appeal  as  strongly  to  the  creative 
listener  in  his  home  as  does  the  less  perfect 
but  more  impressionable  piano-player,  which 
responds  like  a  cycle  to  pedal  and  brake.  For 
the  records  of  the  phonograph  and  of  the 
electric  piano,  once  they  are  made,  are  made. 
Thereafter  they  are  as  insensible  to  influence 
as  the  laws  of  the  Medes  and  Persians.  They 
do  not  admit  the  audience  to  an  active,  in- 
fluential part  in  the  performance.  But  such 
a  part  in  the  performance  is  exactly  what  the 
true  listener  demands  as  his  democratic  right. 
And  rather  than  be  balked  of  it,  he  turns  to 
the  less  sophisticated  mechanism  of  the  piano- 
player.  This,  at  least,  responds  to  his  control. 

Undeniably,  though,  even  the  warmest  en- 
thusiasts for  the  piano-player  come  in  time  to 
realize  that  their  machine  has  distinct  limita- 
tions; that  it  is  better  suited  to  certain  pieces 
than  to  others.  They  find  that  music  may  be 
f  209  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

performed  on  it  with  the  more  triumphant 
success  the  less  human  it  is  and  the  nearer  it 
comes  to  the  soullessness  of  an  arabesque. 
The  best  operator,  by  pumping  or  pulling  stops 
or  switching  levers,  cannot  entirely  succeed 
in  imbuing  it  with  the  breath  of  life.  The  dis- 
quieting fact  remains  that  the  more  a  certain 
piece  demands  to  be  filled  with  soul,  the  thin- 
ner and  more  ghost-like  it  comes  forth.  The 
less  intimately  human  the  music,  the  more 
satisfactorily  it  emerges.  For  example,  the 
performer  is  stirred  by  the  "Tannhauser 
March,"  as  rendered  by  himself,  with  its 
flourish  of  trumpets  and  its  general  hurrah- 
boys.  But  he  is  unmoved  by  the  apostrophe 
to  the  "Evening  Star"  from  the  same  opera. 
For  this,  in  passing  through  the  piano-player, 
is  almost  reduced  to  a  frigid  astronomical 
basis.  The  singer  is  no  longer  Scotti  or  Bis- 
pham,  but  Herschel  or  Laplace.  The  operator 
may  pump  and  switch  until  he  breaks  his  heart 
—  but  if  he  has  any  real  musical  instinct,  he 
will  surely  grow  to  feel  a  sense  of  lack  hi  this 
[  210  ] 


MISSION    OF    MUSIC 

sort  of  music.  So  for  the  present,  while  con- 
fidently awaiting  the  invention  of  an  improved 
piano-player,  which  shall  give  equally  free  ex- 
pression to  every  mood  and  tense  of  the  human 
spirit  —  the  operator  learns  to  avoid  the  very 
soulful  things  as  much  as  is  practicable. 

At  this  stage  of  his  development  he  usually 
begins  to  crave  that  supreme  kind  of  music 
which  demands  a  perfect  balance  of  the  in- 
tellectual, the  sensuous,  and  the  emotional. 
So  he  goes  more  often  to  concerts  where  such 
music  is  given.  Saturated  with  it,  he  returns 
to  his  piano-player  and  plays  the  concert  all 
over  again.  And  his  imagination  is  now  so 
full  of  the  emotional  side  of  what  he  has 
just  heard  and  is  re-hearing,  that  he  easily 
discounts  the  obvious  shortcomings  of  the 
mechanical  instrument.  This  is  an  excellent 
way  of  getting  the  most  from  music.  One 
should  not,  as  many  do,  take  it  from  the 
piano-player  before  the  concert  and  then  go 
with  its  somewhat  stereotyped  accents  so 
fixed  in  the  mind  as  to  obscure  the  heart  of 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

the  performance.  Rather,  in  preparation, 
let  the  score  be  silently  glanced  through. 
Leave  wide  the  doors  of  the  soul  for  the  pre- 
cious spiritual  part  of  the  music  to  enter  in 
and  take  possession.  After  this  happens, 
use  mechanical  music  to  renew  your  memories 
of  the  concert,  just  as  you  would  use  a  cata- 
logue illustrated  with  etchings  in  black  and 
white,  to  renew  your  memory  of  an  exhibition 
of  paintings. 

The  supreme  mission  of  mechanical  music 
is  its  direct  educational  mission.  By  this  I 
mean  something  more  than  its  educational 
mission  to  the  many  thousands  of  grown  men 
and  women  whose  latent  interest  hi  music  it 
is  suddenly  awakening.  I  have  in  mind  the 
girls  and  boys  of  the  rising  generation.  If 
people  can  only  hear  enough  good  music  when 
they  are  young,  without  having  it  forcibly  fed 
to  them,  they  are  almost  sure  to  care  for  it 
when  they  come  to  years  of  discretion.  The 
reason  'why  America  is  not  more  musical  is 
[  212  ] 


MISSION    OF    MUSIC 

that  we  men  and  women  of  to-day  did  not 
yesterday,  as  children,  hear  enough  good  mu- 
sic. Our  parents  probably  could  not  afford 
it.  It  was  then  a  luxury,  implying  expen- 
sive concert  tickets  or  an  elaborate  musical 
training  for  someone  in  the  family. 

The  invention  of  mechanical  instruments 
ended  this  state  of  affairs  forever  by  suddenly 
making  the  best  music  as  inexpensive  as  the 
worst.  There  exists  no  longer  any  financial 
reason  why  most  children  should  not  grow 
up  in  an  atmosphere  of  the  best  music.  And 
I  believe  that  so  soon  as  parents  learn  how 
to  educate  their  children  through  the  phono- 
graph or  the  mechanical  piano,  the  world 
will  realize  with  a  start  that  the  invention  of 
these  things  is  doing  more  for  musical  culture 
than  the  invention  of  printing  did  for  literary 
culture. 

We  must  bear  in  mind,  however,  that  the 

invention  of  mechanical  instruments  has  come 

far  earlier  in  the  history  of  music  than  the 

invention  of  printing  came  in  the  history  of 

[  213  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

literature.  Music  is  the  youngest  of  the  fine 
arts.  It  is  in  somewhat  the  same  stage  of 
development  to-day  that  literature  was  in 
the  tune  of  Homer.  It  is  in  the  age  of  oral  — 
and  aural  —  tradition.  Most  people  still  take 
in  music  through  their  ears  alone.  For  all 
that  the  invention  of  note-printing  means 
to  them  as  enjoyers  of  music,  they  might 
almost  as  well  be  living  aeons  before  Guten- 
berg. Musically  speaking,  they  belong  to  the 
Homeric  age. 

Now  the  entrance  of  mechanical  music  upon 
the  scene  is  making  men  depend  on  their  ears 
more  than  ever.  It  is  intensifying  and  speed- 
ing up  this  age  of  oral  tradition.  But  in  so  do- 
ing, I  believe  that  it  is  bound  to  shorten  this 
age  also,  on  the  principle  that  the  faster  you 
go  the  sooner  you  arrive.  Thus,  machinery 
is  hastening  us  toward  the  time  when  the  per- 
son of  ordinary  culture  will  no  more  depend 
on  his  ears  alone  for  the  enjoyment  of  music 
than  he  now  depends  on  his  ears  alone  for  the 
enjoyment  of  Shakespeare. 
[  214  ] 


MISSION    OF    MUSIC  \ 

Thanks  to  machine-made  music,  the  day  is 
coming  the  sooner  when  we  shall  behold,  as 
neighbors  in  the  ordinary  bookcase,  such  pairs 
of  counterparts  as  Milton  and  Bach,  Beethoven 
and  Shakespeare,  Loeffler  and  Maeterlinck, 
Byron  and  Tschaikowsky,  Mendelssohn  and 
Longfellow,  Nietzsche  and  Richard  Strauss. 
Browning  will  stand  up  cheek  by  jowl  with 
his  one  true  affinity,  Brahms.  And  the  owner 
will  sit  by  the  quiet  hearth  reading  to  him- 
self with  equal  fluency  and  joy  from  Schubert 
and  Keats. 


MASTERS   BY   PROXY 

//  is  only  in  a  surrounding  of  personalities  that  personalities 
can  as  such  make  themselves  seen  and  heard. 

HOUSTON  STEWABT  CHAMBERLAIN-. 

BETWEEN  many  of  my  readers  and  the 
joyful  heart  there  seems  to  stand  but 
a  single  obstacle  —  their  lack  of  creative- 
ness.  They  feel  that  they  could  live  and  die 
happy  if  only  they  might  become  responsible 
for  the  creation  of  something  which  would 
remain  to  bless  mankind  after  they  are  gone. 
But  as  it  is,  how  can  they  have  the  joyful 
heart  when  they  are  continually  being  tor- 
tured by  regret  because  God  did  not  make 
masters  of  them? 

One  is  sad  because  he  is  not  a  master  of 

poetry.    He  never  sees  A,  his  golden-tongued 

friend,  without  a  pang  very  like  the  envy  of 

a  childless  man  for  a  happy  father.    But  he 

I  216  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

has  no  suspicion  that  he  is  partly  responsible 
for  A's  poetic  excellence.  Another  thinks 
her  life  a  mistake  because  the  Master  of  all 
good  workmen  did  not  make  her  a  sculptor. 
Yet  all  the  while  she  is  lavishing  unawares 
upon  her  brother  or  son  or  husband  the  very 
stuff  that  art  is  made  of.  Others  are  incon- 
solable because  no  fairy  wand  at  their  birth 
destined  them  for  men  of  original  action,  for 
discoverers  in  science,  pianists,  statesmen,  or 
actors;  for  painters,  philosophers,  inventors, 
or  architects  of  temples  or  of  religions. 

Now  my  task  in  this  last  chapter  is  a  more 
delightful  one  than  if  I  were  the  usual  solicitor 
of  fiction,  come  to  inform  the  poor-but-honest 
newsboy  that  he  is  a  royal  duke.  It  is  my 
privilege  to  comfort  many  of  the  comfortless  by 
revealing  to  them  how  and  why  they  are  —  or 
may  be  —  masters  of  an  art  as  indispensable 
as  the  arts  which  they  now  regard  so  wistfully. 
I  mean  the  art  of  master-making  —  the  art 
of  being  a  master  by  proxy. 

To  be  specific,  let  us  single  out  one  of  the 
[217  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

arts  and  see  what  it  means  to  master  it  by 
proxy.  Suppose  we  consider  the  simple  case 
of  executive  music.  In  a  book  called  "The 
Musical  Amateur"  I  have  tried  to  prove  (more 
fully  than  is  here  possible)  that  the  repro- 
duction of  music  is  a  social  act.  It  needs  two: 
one  to  perform,  one  to  appreciate.  Both  are 
almost  equally  essential  to  a  good  perform- 
ance. The  man  who  appreciates  a  musical 
phrase  unconsciously  imitates  it  with  almost 
imperceptible  contractions  of  throat  or  lips. 
These  contractions  represent  an  incipient 
singing  or  whistling.  Motions  similar  to 
these,  and  probably  more  fully  developed,  are 
made  at  the  same  time  by  his  mind  and  his 
spirit.  The  whole  man  actually  feels  his  way, 
physically  and  psychically,  into  the  heart  of 
the  music.  He  is  turned  into  a  sentient 
sounding-board  which  adds  its  own  contribu- 
tion of  emotion  to  the  music  and  sends  it 
back  by  wireless  telegraphy  to  the  performer. 
When  a  violinist  and  a  listener  of  the  right 
sort  meet  for  musical  purposes,  this  is  what 
[  218  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

happens.  The  violinist  happens  to  be  in  the 
mood  for  playing.  This  means  that  he  has 
feelings  which  demand  expression.  These  his 
bow  releases.  The  music  strikes  the  listener, 
sets  him  in  vibration  as  if  he  were  a  sounding- 
board,  and  rouses  in  him  feelings  similar  to 
those  of  the  violinist.  Enriched  by  this  new 
contribution,  the  emotional  complex  resounds 
back  to  the  violinist,  intensifying  his  original 
"feeling-state."  In  its  heightened  form  it 
then  recoils  back  to  the  appreciator,  "and  so 
on,  back  and  forth,  growing  in  stimulating 
power  at  each  recoil.  The  whole  process  is 
something  like  a  hot  'rally'  in  tennis,  with  the 
opponents  closing  in  on  each  other  and  the 
ball  shuttling  across  the  net  faster  with 
every  stroke  as  the  point  gains  in  excitement 
and  pleasure.  'Social  resonance'  might  be  a 
good  way  of  describing  the  thing."  This, 
briefly  told,  is  what  passes  between  the  player 
of  music  and  his  creative  listener. 

In  application  this  principle  does  not  by 
any  means  stop  with  performing  or  composing 
[  219  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

\ 

music  or  with  the  fine  arts.  It  goes  on  to 
embrace  more  things  in  heaven  and  earth 
than  are  dreamed  of  in  the  fiddler's  or  in  any 
other  artist's  philosophy.  Perhaps  it  is  not 
too  much  to  say  that  no  great  passion  or  action 
has  ever  had  itself  adequately  expressed  with- 
out the  cooperation  of  this  social  resonance, 
without  the  help  of  at  least  one  of  those 
modest,  unrecognized  partners  of  genius,  the 
social  resonators,  the  masters  by  proxy. 

Thanks,  dear  master-makers  unawares! 
The  gratitude  of  the  few  who  understand  you 
is  no  less  sincere  because  you  do  not  yet  realize 
your  own  thankworthiness.  Our  children 
shall  rise  up  and  call  you  blessed.  For  in 
your  quiet  way,  you  have  helped  to  create 
the  world's  creators  —  the  preachers,  prophets, 
captains,  artists,  discoverers,  and  seers  of  the 
ages.  To  these,  you,  unrecognized  and  una- 
wares, have  been  providing  the  very  sinews 
of  peace,  vision,  war,  beauty,  originality,  and 
insight. 

What  made  the  game  of  art  so  brilliant  in 
[  220  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

the  age  of  Pericles?  It  was  not  star  playing 
by  individuals .  It  was  steady,  consistent  team- 
work by  the  many.  Almost  every  one  of  the 
Athenians  who  were  not  masters  were  masters 
by  proxy.  In  "The  Foundations  of  the  Nine- 
teenth Century"  Chamberlain  holds  that 
Greek  culture  derived  its  incomparable  charm 
from  "a  peculiar  harmony  of  greatness"; 
and  that  "if  our  poets  are  not  in  every  re- 
spect equal  to  the  greatest  poets  of  Athens, 
that  is  not  the  fault  of  their  talent,  but  of 
those  who  surround  them."  Only  imagine 
the  joyful  ease  of  being  a  poet  in  the  Periclean 
atmosphere!  It  must  have  been  as  exhil- 
arating as  coasting  down  into  the  Yosemite 
Valley  with  John  Muir  on  an  avalanche  of 
snow. 

But  even  in  that  enlightened  age  the  master 
received  all  the  credit  for  every  achievement, 
and  his  creative  appreciator  none  at  all.  And 
so  it  has  been  ever  since  that  particular 
amoeba  which  was  destined  for  manhood  had 
a  purse  made  up  for  him  and  was  helped  upon 
[  221  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

the  train  of  evolution  by  his  less  fortunate 
and  more  self-effacing  friends  who  were  des- 
tined to  remain  amoebae;  because  the  master 
by  proxy  is  such  a  retiring,  unspectacular  sort 
of  person  that  he  has  never  caught  the  popular 
imagination  or  found  any  one  to  sing  his 
praises.  But  if  he  should  ever  resent  this 
neglect  and  go  on  strike,  we  should  realize 
that  without  him  progress  is  impossible.  For 
the  real  lords  of  creation  are  not  always  the 
apparent  lords.  We  should  bear  in  mind 
that  the  most  important  part  of  many  a  throne 
is  not  the  red  velvet  seat,  the  back  of  cloth 
of  gold,  or  the  onyx  arms  that  so  sumptuously 
accommodate  the  awe  and  majesty  of  acknowl- 
edged kings.  Neither  is  it  the  seed-pearl  can- 
opy that  intercepts  a  too  searching  light  from 
majesty's  complexion.  It  is  a  certain  little 
filigreed  hole  in  the  throne-back  which  falls 
conveniently  close  to  the  sovereign's  ear  when 
he  leans  back  between  the  periods  of  the 
wise,  beauteous,  and  thrilling  address  to  his 
subjects. 

[  222  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

For  doubled  up  in  a  dark,  close  box  behind 
the  chair  of  state  is  a  humble,  drab  individual 
who,  from  time  to  time,  applies  his  mouth 
to  the  wrong  side  of  the  filigreed  hole  and 
whispers  things.  If  he  were  visible  at  all,  he 
would  look  like  the  absurd  prompter  under 
the  hood  at  the  opera.  He  is  not  a  famous 
person.  Most  people  are  so  ignorant  of  his 
very  existence  that  he  might  be  pardoned  for 
being  an  agnostic  about  it  himself.  The  few 
others  know  little  and  care  less.  Only  two  or 
three  of  the  royal  family  are  aware  of  his 
name  and  real  function.  They  refer  to  him 
as  M.  Power-Behind-the-Throne,  Master-by- 
Proxy  of  State. 

There  is  one  sign  by  which  masters  by  proxy 
may  be  detected  wherever  met.  They  are 
people  whose  presence  is  instantly  invigorat- 
ing. Before  you  can  make  out  the  color  of 
their  eyes  you  begin  to  feel  that  you  are  greater 
than  you  know.  It  is  as  if  they  wore  diffused 
about  them  auras  so  extensive  and  powerful 
that  entering  these  auras  was  equivalent  to 
[  223  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

giving  your  soul  electric  massage.  You  do 
not  have  to  touch  the  hem  of  their  garments 
nor  even  see  them.  The  auras  penetrate  a 
brick  wall  as  a  razor  penetrates  Swiss  cheese, 
And  if  you  are  fortunate  enough  to  be  on  the 
other  side  of  the  partition,  you  become  aware 
with  a  thrill  that  "virtue,"  in  the  beautiful, 
Biblical  sense  of  the  word,  has  gone  out  of 
somebody  and  into  you. 

If  ever  I  return  to  live  in  a  city  apartment 
(which  may  the  gods  forfend!)  I  shall  this  time 
select  the  apartment  with  almost  sole  refer- 
ence to  what  comes  through  the  walls.  I 
shall  enter  one  of  those  typical  New  York 
piles  which  O.  Henry  described  as  "paved 
with  Parian  marble  in  the  entrance-hall, 
and  cobblestones  above  the  first  floor,"  and 
my  inquiry  will  be  focused  on  things  far  other 
than  Parian  marble  and  cobblestones.  I  shall 
walk  about  the  rooms  and  up  and  down  the 
bowling-alleys  of  halls  trying  to  make  myself 
as  sensitive  to  impressions  as  are  the  arms  of 
the  divining-rod  man  during  his  solemn 
[  224  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

parade  with  the  wand  of  witch-hazel.  And 
when  I  feel  "virtue"  from  the  next  apart- 
ment streaming  through  the  partition,  there  will 
I  instantly  give  battle  to  the  agent  and  take 
up  my  abode.  And  this  though  it  be  up  six 
flights  of  cobblestones,  without  elevator,  with- 
out closet-room,  with  a  paranoiac  for  janitor, 
and  radiators  whose  musical  performance  all 
the  day  long  would  make  a  Cleveland  boiler 
factory  pale  with  envy.  For  none  of  these 
things  would  begin  to  offset  the  privilege  of 
living  beside  a  red-letter  wall  whose  influence 
should  be  as  benignly  constructive  as  Richard 
Washburn  Child's  "Blue  Wall"  was  malignly 
destructive. 

To-day  I  should  undoubtedly  be  much 
more  of  a  person  if  I  had  once  had  the  pleasure 
of  living  a  wall  away  from  Richard  Watson 
Gilder.  He  was  a  true  master  by  proxy.  For 
he  was  a  vastly  more  creative  person  than  his 
published  writings  will  ever  accredit  him 
with  being.  Not  only  with  his  pen,  but  also 
with  his  whole  self  he  went  about  doing 
[  225  ] 


THE   JOYFUL   HEART 

good.  "Virtue"  fairly  streamed  from  him 
all  the  time.  Those  bowed  shoulders  and 
deep-set,  kindly  eyes  would  emerge  from  the 
inner  sanctum  of  the  "Century'*  office.  In 
three  short  sentences  he  would  reject  the  story 
which  had  cost  you  two  years  of  labor  and 
travail.  But  all  the  time  the  fatal  words 
were  getting  themselves  uttered,  so  much 
"virtue"  was  passing  from  him  into  you  that 
you  would  turn  from  his  presence  exhil- 
arated, uplifted,  and  while  treading  higher 
levels  for  the  next  week,  would  produce  a 
check-bearing  tale.  The  check,  however, 
would  not  bring  you  a  tithe  of  the  "virtue" 
that  the  great  editor's  personal  rebuff  had 
brought. 

But  more  than  to  any  editor,  writers 
look  to  their  readers  for  support,  especially 
to  their  unknown  correspondents  —  postal  and 
psychic.  Leonard  Merrick  has  so  finely 
expressed  the  attitude  of  many  writers  that 
I  cannot  forbear  giving  his  words  to  his 
"public": 

[  226  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

I  have  thought  of  you  so  often  and  wanted  to 
win  a  smile  from  you;  you  don't  realize  how  I 
have  longed  to  meet  you  —  to  listen  to  you,  to 
have  you  lift  the  veil  that  hides  your  mind  from 
me.  Sometimes  in  a  crowd  I  have  fancied  I  caught 
a  glimpse  of  you;  I  can't  explain  —  the  poise  of 
the  head,  a  look  in  the  eyes,  there  was  something 
that  hinted  it  was  You.  And  in  a  whirlwind  of 
an  instant  it  almost  seemed  that  you  would  recog- 
nize me;  but  you  said  no  word  —  you  passed,  a 
secret  from  me  still.  To  yourself  where  you  are 
sitting  you  are  just  a  charming  woman  with  "a 
local  habitation  and  a  name";  but  to  me  you  are 
not  Miss  or  Madam,  not  M.  or  N.  —  you  are  a 
Power,  and  I  have  sought  you  by  a  name  you  have 
not  heard  —  you  are  my  Public.  And  O  my  Lady, 
I  am  speaking  to  you!  I  feel  your  presence  in 
my  senses,  though  you  are  far  away  and  I  can't 
hear  your  answer.  ...  It  is  as  if  I  had  touched 
your  hand  across  the  page. 

There  are  probably  more  masters  by  proxy 
to  be  found  among  the  world's  mothers  than 
in  any  other  class.  The  profession  of  mother- 
hood is  such  a  creative  one,  and  demands  so 
constant  an  outgo  of  unselfish  sympathy,  that 
a  mother's  technic  as  silent  partner  is  usually 
kept  in  a  highly  efficient  state.  And  occa- 
[  227  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

sionally  a  mother  of  a  genius  deserves  as  much 
credit  for  him  spiritually  as  physically.  Think 
of  Frau  Goethe,  for  example. 

Many  a  genius  attains  a  commanding  posi- 
tion largely  through  the  happy  chance  of 
meeting  many  powerful  masters  by  proxy  and 
through  his  happy  facility  for  taking  and 
using  whatever  creativeness  these  have  to 
offer.  Genius  has  been  short-sightedly  defined 
as  "an  infinite  capacity  for  taking  pains." 
Galton  more  truthfully  holds  that  the  triune 
factors  of  genius  are  industry,  enthusiasm,  and 
ability.  Now  if  we  were  to  insist,  as  so  many 
do,  on  making  a  definition  out  of  a  single  one 
of  these  factors  to  the  neglect  of  the  others, 
we  should  come  perhaps  nearer  the  mark  by 
saying  that  genius  is  an  infinite  capacity  for 
taking  others'  pains.  But  all  such  definings 
are  absurd.  For  the  genius  absorbs  and  alche- 
mizes not  only  the  industry  of  his  silent 
partners,  but  also  their  ability  and  enthusiasm. 
Their  enthusiasm  is  fortunately  contained  in  a 
receptacle  as  generous  as  Philemon's  famous 
[  228  1 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

pitcher.  And  the  harder  the  genius  tries  to 
pour  it  empty,  the  more  the  sparkling  liquid 
bubbles  up  inside.  The  transaction  is  like 
"the  quality  of  mercy"  — 

"It  blesseth  him  that  gives  and  him  that  takes." 

The  ability  to  receive  as  well  as  give  this 
sort  of  help  varies  widely  with  the  individual. 
Some  geniuses  of  large  psychic  power  are  able 
instantly  to  seize  out  of  any  crowd  whatever 
creativeness  there  is  in  it.  These  persons  are 
spiritual  giants.  Their  strength  is  as  the 
strength  of  ten  because  their  grasp  is  sure. 
They  are  such  stuff  as  Shakespeares  are  made  of. 

Others  are  not  psychically  gifted.  They 
can  absorb  creativeness  only  from  then*  near- 
est and  dearest,  in  the  most  favoring  environ- 
ment, and  only  after  the  current  has  been 
seriously  depleted  by  wastage  in  transmission. 
But  these  are  the  two  extremes.  They  are  as 
rare  as  extremes  usually  are. 

In  general  I  believe  that  genius,   though 
normally  capable  of  drawing  creativeness  from 
[  229  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

a  number  of  different  sources,  has  as  a  rule 
depended  largely  on  the  collaboration  of  one 
chief  master  by  proxy.  This  idea  gazes  wide- 
eyed  down  a  fascinating  vista  of  speculation. 
Who,  for  instance,  was  Lincoln's  silent  partner? 
the  power  behind  the  throne  of  Charlemagne? 
Buddha's  better  self?  Who  were  the  secret 
commanders  of  Grant,  Wellington,  and  Caesar? 
Who  was  Moliere's  hidden  prompter?  the 
conductor  of  the  orchestra  called  Beethoven? 
the  psychic  comrade  of  Columbus? 

I  do  not  know.  For  history  has  never  com- 
memorated, as  such,  the  masters  by  proxy 
with  honor  due,  or  indeed  with  any  honor 
or  remembrance  at  all.  It  will  take  centuries 
to  explore  the  past  with  the  sympathetic 
eye  and  the  understanding  heart  in  order  to 
discover  what  great  tombs  we  have  most 
flagrantly  neglected. 

Already  we  can  single  out  a  few  of  them. 

The  time  is  coming  when  music-lovers  will 

never  make  a  pilgrimage  to  the  resting-place 

of  Wagner  without  making   another  to  the 

[  230  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

grave  of  Mathilde  Wesendonk,  whose  "virtue" 
breathed  into  "Tristan  and  Isolde"  the  breath 
of  life.  We  shall  not  much  longer  neglect 
the  tomb  of  Charles  Darwin's  father,  who,  by 
making  the  evolutionist  financially  independ- 
ent, gave  his  services  to  the  world.  Nor 
shall  we  disregard  the  memory  of  that 
other  Charles-Darwin-by-proxy  —  his  wife. 
For  her  tireless  comradeship  and  devotion  and 
freely  lavished  vitality  were  an  indispensable 
reservoir  of  strength  to  the  great  invalid. 
Without  it  the  world  would  never  have  had 
the  "Origin  of  Species"  or  the  "Descent  of 
Man." 

Other  instances  throng  to  mind.  I  have 
small  doubt  that  Charles  Eliot  Norton  was 
the  silent  partner  of  Carlyle,  Ruskin,  and 
Lowell;  Ste.  Clare  of  Francis  of  Assisi;  Joachim 
and  Billroth  of  Brahms,  and  Dorothy  Words- 
worth of  William.  By  a  pleasant  coincidence, 
I  had  no  sooner  noted  down  the  last  of  these 
names  than  I  came  upon  this  sentence  in 
Sarah  Orne  Jewett's  Letters:  "How  much 
[  231  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

that  we  call  Wordsworth  himself  was  Dorothy 
to  begin  with."  And  soon  after,  I  found  these 
words  in  a  letter  which  Brahms  sent  Joachim 
with  the  score  of  his  second  "Serenade": 
"Care  for  the  piece  a  little,  dear  friend;  it  is 
very  much  yours  and  sounds  of  you.  Whence 
comes  it,  anyway,  that  music  sounds  so 
friendly,  if  it  is  not  the  doing  of  the  one  or 
two  people  whom  one  loves  as  I  love  you?" 
The  impressionable  Charles  Lamb  must  have 
had  many  such  partners  besides  his  sister 
Mary.  Hazlitt  wrote:  "He  is  one  of  those 
of  whom  it  may  be  said,  'Tell  me  your  com- 
pany, and  I'll  tell  you  your  manners.'  He  is 
the  creature  of  sympathy,  and  makes  good 
whatever  opinion  you  seem  to  entertain  of 
him." 

Perhaps  the  most  creative  master  by  proxy 
I  have  ever  known  was  the  wife  of  one  of  our 
ex-Presidents.  To  call  upon  her  was  to  experi- 
ence the  elevation  and  mental  unlimbering  of 
three  or  four  glasses  of  champagne,  with  none 
of  that  liquid's  less  desirable  after-effects. 
[  232  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

I  should  not  wonder  if  her  eminent  husband's 
success  were  not  due  as  much  to  her  creative- 
ness  as  to  his  own. 

It  sometimes  happens  that  the  most  potent 
masters  in  their  own  right  are  also  the  most 
potent  masters  by  proxy.  They  grind  out 
more  power  than  they  can  consume  in  their 
own  particular  mill-of-the-gods.  I  am  in- 
clined to  think  that  Sir  Humphry  Davy  was 
one  of  these.  He  was  the  discoverer  of  chlo- 
rine and  laughing-gas,  and  the  inventor  of 
the  miner's  safety  lamp.  He  was  also  the 
deus  ex  machina  who  rescued  Faraday  from 
the  bookbinder's  bench,  made  him  the  com- 
panion of  his  travels,  and  incidentally  poured 
out  the  overplus  of  his  own  creative  en- 
ergy upon  the  youth  who  has  recently  been 
called  "perhaps  the  most  remarkable  dis- 
coverer of  the  nineteenth  century."  Schiller 
was  another  of  these.  "In  more  senses  than 
one  your  sympathy  is  fruitful,"  wrote  Goethe 
to  him  during  the  composition  of  "Faust." 

Indeed,    the    greatest    Master    known    to 

f  233  1 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

history  was  first  and  foremost  a  master  by 
proxy.  It  was  He  who  declared  that  we  all 
are  "members  one  of  another."  Writing 
nothing  Himself,  He  inspired  others  to  write 
thousands  of  immortal  books.  He  was  un- 
skilled as  painter,  or  sculptor,  or  architect; 
yet  the  greatest  canvases,  marbles,  and  cathe- 
drals since  He  trod  the  earth  have  sprung 
directly  from  his  influence.  He  was  no 
musician. 

"His  song  was  only  living  aloud." 

But  that  silent  song  was  the  direct  inspiration 
of  much  of  the  sublimest  music  of  the  cen- 
turies to  come.  And  so  we  might  go  on  and 
on  about  this  Master  of  all  vicarious  masters. 
Yet  it  is  a  strange  and  touching  thing  to 
note  that  even  his  exuberant  creativeness 
sometimes  needed  the  refreshment  of  silent 
partners.  When  He  was  at  last  to  perform 
a  great  action  hi  his  own  right  He  looked  about 
for  support  and  found  a  master  by  proxy  hi 
Mary,  the  sister  of  the  practical  Martha. 
[  234  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

But  when  He  turned  for  help  in  uttermost 
need  to  his  best-beloved  disciples  He  found 
them  only  negative,  destructive  influences. 
This  accounts  for  the  anguish  of  his  re- 
proach: "Could  ye  not  watch  with  me  one 
hour?" 

Having  never  been  properly  recognized  as 
such,  the  world's  masters  by  proxy  have 
never  yet  been  suitably  rewarded.  Now  the 
world  is  convinced  that  its  acknowledged 
masters  deserve  more  of  a  feast  at  life's  sur- 
prise party  than  they  can  bring  along  for 
themselves  hi  their  own  baskets.  So  the 
world  bows  them  to  the  places  of  honor  at  the 
banquet  board.  True,  the  invitation  some- 
times comes  so  late  that  the  master  has  long 
since  devoured  everything  in  his  basket  and 
is  dead  of  starvation.  But  that  makes  not 
the  slightest  difference  to  humanity,  which 
will  take  no  refusal,  and  props  the  cynically 
amused  skeleton  up  at  the  board  next  the 
toastmaster.  My  point  is,  however,  that 
humanity  is  often  forehanded  enough  with 
[  235  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

its  invitations  to  give  the  masters  a  charming 
time  of  it  before  they,  too,  into  the  dust 
descend,  sans  wine,  san$  song,  etc.  But  I 
do  not  know  that  it  has  ever  yet  consciously 
bidden  a  master  by  proxy  —  as  such  —  to  the 
feast.  And  I  contend  that  if  a  man's  deserts 
are  to  be  measured  at  all  by  his  creativeness, 
then  the  great  masters  by  proxy  deserve  seats 
well  up  above  the  salt. 

For  is  it  any  less  praiseworthy  to  make  a 
master  than  to  make  a  masterpiece?  I  grant 
that  the  masterpiece  is  the  more  sudden  and 
dramatic  in  appearing  and  can  be  made  imme- 
diate use  of,  whereas  the  master  is  slowly 
formed,  and  even  then  turns  out  unsatisfac- 
tory in  many  ways.  He  is  apt  to  be  that  well- 
known  and  inconvenient  sort  of  person  who, 
when  he  comes  in  out  of  the  rain  to  dress  for 
his  wedding,  abstractedly  prepares  to  retire 
instead,  and  then,  still  more  abstractedly, 
puts  his  umbrella  to  bed  and  stands  himself 
in  the  corner.  All  the  same,  it  is  no  less  divine 
to  create  a  master  by  slow,  laborious  methods 
[  236  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

than  to  snatch  a  masterpiece  apparently  out 
of  nothing-at-all.  In  the  eye  of  the  evolu- 
tionist, man  is  not  of  any  the  less  value  be- 
cause he  was  made  by  painful  degrees  instead 
of  having  been  produced,  a  perfect  gentleman, 
out  of  the  void  somewhat  as  the  magician 
brings  forth  from  the  empty  saucepan  an 
omelette,  containing  a  live  pigeon  with  the 
loaned  wedding-ring  in  its  beak. 

The  master-makers  have  long  been  expend- 
ing their  share  of  the  power.  It  is  high  time 
they  were  enjoying  their  share  of  the  glory. 
What  an  unconscionable  leveling  up  and  down 
there  will  presently  be  when  it  dawns  upon 
humanity  what  a  large  though  inglorious 
share  it  has  been  having  in  the  spiritually 
creative  work  of  the  world!  In  that  day  the 
seats  of  the  mighty  individualists  of  science, 
industry,  politics,  and  discovery;  of  religion 
and  its  ancient  foe  ecclesiasticism;  of  economy, 
the  arts  and  philosophy,  will  all  be  taken  down 
a  peg  by  the  same  knowledge  that  shall  exalt 
"them  of  low  degree." 

[  237  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

I  can  imagine  how  angrily  ruffled  the  sallow 
shade  of  Arthur  Schopenhauer  will  become 
at  the  dawn  of  this  spiritual  Commune.  When 
the  first  full  notes  of  the  soul's  "Marseillaise" 
burst  upon  his  irritable  eardrums,  I  can  hear 
above  them  his  savage  snarl.  I  can  see  his 
malignant  expression  as  he  is  forced  to  divide 
his  unearned  increment  of  fame  with  some  of 
those  Mitmenschen  whom  he,  like  a  bad 
Samaritan,  loved  to  lash  with  his  tongue  before 
pouring  in  oil  of  vitriol  and  the  sour  wine  of 
sadness.  And  how  like  red-ragged  turkey- 
cocks  Lord  Byron  and  Nietzsche  and  Napo- 
leon will  puff  out  when  required  to  stand 
and  deliver  some  of  their  precious  credit! 

There  will  be  compensations,  though,  to 
the  genius  who,  safely  dead,  feels  himself 
suddenly  despoiled  of  a  fullness  of  fame  which 
he  had  counted  on  enjoying  in  scecula  scecu- 
lorum.  When  he  comes  to  balance  things  up, 
perhaps  he  will  not,  after  all,  find  the  net  loss 
so  serious.  Though  he  lose  some  credit  for 
his  successes,  he  will  also  lose  some  discredit 
[  238  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

for  his  failures.  Humanity  will  recognize  that 
while  the  good  angels  of  genius  are  the  masters 
by  proxy,  the  bad  angels  of  genius  exert  an 
influence  as  negative  and  destructive  as 
the  influence  of  the  others  is  positive  and 
constructive. 

How  jolly  it  will  be,  for  all  but  the  bad 
angels,  when  we  can  assign  to  them  such 
failures  as  Browning's  "The  Inn  Album"; 
Davy's  contention  that  iodine  was  not  an 
element,  and  Luther's  savage  hounding  of 
the  nobles  upon  the  wretched  peasants  who 
had  risen  in  revolt  under  his  own  inspiration. 
But  enough  of  the  bad  angels!  Let  us  inter 
them  with  this  epitaph:  "They  did  their 
worst;  devils  could  do  no  more." 

Turn  we  to  the  bright  side  of  the  situation. 
How  delighted  Keats  will  be  when  at  last  the 
world  develops  a  little  sense  of  proportion, 
and  after  first  neglecting  and  then  over-prais- 
ing him,  finally  proposes  to  give  poor  old 
Severn  his  due  as  a  master  by  proxy.  Imagine 
Sir  William  Herschel's  pleasure  when  his  be- 
[  239  J 


THE   JOYFUL   HEART 

loved  sister  Caroline  begins  to  receive  her 
full  deserts.  And  Tschaikowsky  will  slough 
his  morbidness  and  improvise  a  Slavic  Hal- 
lelujah Chorus  when  his  unseen  patroness 
comes  into  her  own.  It  is  true  that  the 
world  has  already  given  her  memory  two 
fingers  and  a  perfunctory  "thank  ye."  This 
was  for  putting  her  purse  at  Tschaikowsky's 
disposal,  thus  making  it  possible  for  him  to 
write  a  few  immortal  compositions  instead  of 
teaching  mortals  the  piano  in  a  maddening 
conservatory.  But  now,  glory!  hallelujah! 
the  world  is  soon  going  to  render  her  honor 
long  overdue  for  the  spiritual  support  which 
so  ably  reinforced  the  financial. 

And  Sir  Thomas  More,  that  early  socialist  — 
imagine  his  elation!  For  he  will  regard  our 
desire  to  transfer  some  of  his  own  credit  to 
the  man  in  the  pre-Elizabethan  street  as  a 
sure  sign  that  we  are  steadily  approaching  the 
golden  gates  of  his  Utopia.  For  good  Sir 
Thomas  knows  that  our  view  of  heroes  and 
hero-worship  has  always  been  too  little  demo- 
[  240  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

cratic.  We  have  been  over-inclined,  with  the 
aristocratic  Carlyle,  to  see  all  history  as  a 
procession  of  a  few  transcendent  masters 
surrounded,  preceded,  and  followed  by  enor- 
mous herds  of  abject  and  quite  insignificant 
slaves.  Between  these  slaves  and  the  masters, 
there  is,  in  the  old  view,  about  as  much 
similarity  as  exists  in  the  child's  imagination 
between  the  overwhelming  dose  of  castor  oil 
and  the  single  pluperfect  chocolate  drop  where- 
by the  dose  is  supposed  to  be  made  endurable. 
Already  the  idea  is  beginning  to  glimmer  that 
heroic  stuff  is  far  more  evenly  distributed 
throughout  the  throng  than  we  had  supposed. 
It  is,  of  course,  very  meet  and  very  right 
and  our  bounden  duty  to  admire  the  world's 
standard,  official  heroes.  But  it  is  wrong  to 
revere  them  to  the  exclusion  of  folk  less  showy 
but  perhaps  no  less  essential.  It  is  almost  as 
wrong  as  it  would  be  for  the  judges  at  the 
horse-show  to  put  the  dog-cart  before  the 
horse  and  then  focus  their  admiring  glances 
so  exclusively  upon  the  vehicle  that  they  for- 
[  241  ] 


THE   JOYFUL    HEART 

got  the  very  existence  of  its  patient  and  un- 
self-eonscious  propeller. 

It  is  especially  fitting  that  we  should  awake 
to  the  worth  of  the  master  by  proxy  just  now, 
when  the  movement  for  the  socialization  of 
the  world,  after  so  many  ineffectual  centuries, 
is  beginning  to  engage  the  serious  attention  of 
mankind.  Thus  far,  one  of  the  chief  reaction- 
ary arguments  against  all  men  being  free  has 
been  that  men  are  so  shockingly  unequal. 
And  the  reactionaries  have  called  us  to  wit- 
ness the  gulf  that  yawns,  for  example,  between 
the  god-like  individualist,  Ysaye,  and  the 
worm-like  little  factory  girl  down  there  in 
the  audience  balanced  on  the  edge  of  the  seat 
and  listening  to  the  violin  —  her  rapt  soul 
sitting  in  her  eyes.  Now,  however,  we  know 
that,  but  for  the  wireless  tribute  of  crea- 
tiveness  that  flashes  up  to  the  monarch  of 
tone  from  that  "rapt  soul"  and  others  as 
humble  and  as  rapt  —  the  king  of  fiddlers 
would  then  and  there  be  obliged  to  lay  down 
his  horsehair  scepter  and  abdicate. 
[  242  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

We  have  reached  a  stage  of  social  evolu- 
tion where  it  is  high  time  that  one  foolish 
old  fallacy  should  share  the  fate  of  the  now 
partially  discredited  belief  that  "genius  will 
out"  hi  spite  of  man  or  devil.  This  fallacy 
is  the  supposition  that  man's  creativeness  is 
to  be  measured  solely  by  its  visible,  audible, 
or  tangible  results.  Browning's  old  Rabbi 
made  a  shrewd  commentary  on  this  question 
when  he  declared: 

"Not  on  the  vulgar  mass 
Called  'work,'  must  sentence  pass, 
Things  done  that  took  the  eye  and  had  the  price .   .  . 
But  all  the  world's  coarse  thumb 
And  finger  failed  to  plumb.  .  .  . 
Thoughts  hardly  to  be  packed 
Into  a  narrow  act, 

Fancies  that  broke  through  language  and  escaped: 
All  I  could  never  be, 
All  men  ignored  in  me, 

This,  I  was  worth  to  God,  whose  wheel  the  pitcher 
shaped." 

Yes,  we  are  being  slowly  socialized,  even 
to  our  way  of  regarding  genius;  and  this  has 
been  until  now  the  last  unchallenged  strong- 
[  243  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

hold  of  individualism.  We  perceive  that 
even  there  individualism  must  no  longer  be 
allowed  to  have  it  all  its  own  way.  After  a 
century  we  are  beginning  to  realize  that  the 
truth  was  in  our  first  socially  minded  English 
poet  when  he  sang: 

"Nothing  in  the  world  is  single, 
All  things  by  a  law  divine 
In  one  another's  being  mingle." 

To-day  we  have  in  library,  museum,  gal- 
lery, and  cathedral  tangible  records  of  the 
creativeness  of  the  world's  masters.  Soon  I 
think  we  are  to  possess  —  thanks  to  Edison 
and  the  cinematographers  —  intangible  rec- 
ords —  or  at  least  suggestions  —  of  the  mod- 
est creativeness  of  our  masters  by  proxy. 
Some  day  every  son  with  this  inspiring  sort 
of  mother  will  have  as  complete  means  as 
science  and  his  purse  affords,  of  perpetuating 
her  voice,  her  changing  look,  her  walk,  her 
tender  smile.  Thus  he  may  keep  at  least  a 
gleam  of  her  essential  creativeness  always  at 
hand  for  help  in  the  hour  of  need. 
f  244  1 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

I  would  give  almost  anything  if  I  could  have 
in  a  storage  battery  beside  me  now  some  of  the 
electric  current  that  was  forever  flowing  out 
of  my  own  mother,  or  out  of  Richard  Watson 
Gilder,  or  out  of  Hayd  Sampson,  a  glorious 
old  "inglorious  Milton"  of  a  master  by  proxy 
whom  I  once  found  toiling  in  a  small  livery- 
stable  in  Minnesota.  My  faith  is  firm  that 
some  such  miracle  will  one  day  be  performed. 
And  in  our  irreverent,  Yankee  way  we  may 
perhaps  call  the  captured  product  of  the  master 
by  proxy  —  "canned  virtue."  In  that  event 
the  twenty-first  centurion  will  no  more  think 
of  setting  out  on  a  difficult  task  or  for  a  God- 
forsaken environment  without  a  supply  of 
"canned  virtue"  than  of  starting  for  one  of 
the  poles  equipped  with  only  a  pocketful  of 
pemmican. 

There  is  a  grievous  amount  of  latent  mas- 
ter-making talent  spoiling  to-day  for  want  of 
development.  Many  an  one  feels  creative 
energy  crying  aloud  within  himself  for  vica- 
rious spiritual  expression.  He  would  be  a 
[  245  ] 


THE    JOYFUL    HEART 

master  by  proxy,  yet  is  at  a  loss  how  to  learn. 
Him  I  would  recommend  to  try  learning  the 
easiest  form  of  the  art.  Let  him  resolve  to 
become  a  creative  listener  to  music.  Once 
he  is  able  to  influence  reproducers  of  art  like 
pianists  and  singers,  he  can  then  begin  grop- 
ing by  analogy  toward  the  more  difficult  art 
of  influencing  directly  the  world's  creators. 
But  even  if  he  finds  himself  quite  lacking  in 
creativeness,  he  can  still  be  a  silent  partner 
of  genius  if  he  will  relax  purse-strings,  or  cause 
them  to  be  relaxed,  for  the  founding  of  crea- 
tive fellowships. 

I  do  not  know  if  ever  yet  in  the  history  of 
the  planet  the  mighty  force  which  resides  in 
the  masters  by  proxy  has  been  systematically 
used.  I  am  sure  it  has  never  been  systematic- 
ally conserved,  and  that  it  is  one  of  the  least 
understood  and  least  developed  of  earth's 
natural  resources.  One  of  our  next  long  steps 
forward  should  be  along  this  line  of  the  con- 
servation of  "virtue."  The  last  physical 
frontier  has  practically  been  passed.  Now  let 
[  246  ] 


MASTERS    BY    PROXY 

us  turn  to  the  undiscovered  continents  of 
soul  which  have  so  long  been  awaiting  their 
Columbuses  and  Daniel  Boones,  their  country- 
life  commissions  and  conferences  of  governors. 

When  the  hundredth  part  of  you  possible 
masters  by  proxy  shall  grow  aware  of  your 
possibilities,  and  take  your  light  from  under 
the  bushel,  and  use  it  to  reinforce  the  flickering 
flame  of  talent  at  your  elbow,  or  to  illumine 
the  path  of  some  unfortunate  and  stumbling 
genius,  or  to  heighten  the  brilliance  of  the 
consummate  master  —  our  civilization  will 
take  a  mighty  step  towards  God. 

Try  it,  my  masters! 

THE  END 


247 


CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U   .   S    .   A 


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MUSIC 

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